Chris Kawecki S95 Dostoevsky class w/ Joanna HubbsI aimed to engage with the class discussions. I wanted to learn, this semester, a skill that I had always failed at, class discussion. It didn't work. I am still rather incapable. Most comments I heard during class struck me (as always happens in classes for me) as undisciplined. So my mind wanders. It does some good wandering, and the time in wandering is well-spent. Yet the fact of the matter is that I am still incapable of the group-brainstorm that class meetings seem to be.
I completed all the books, with the exception of The Possessed. The break from Dostoevsky I got instead of reading {\em The Possessed} was worthwhile, enabling me to spend some time with Tolstoy. I read Hadji Murad, a few sections of Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, Thomas Mann's essay Goethe and Tolstoy, and some of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (by George Steiner). I am a slow reader; I am very proud of all the reading I completed this semester.
I aimed this semester to really appreciate literary criticism. I wanted to understand how it is really useful, and I wanted to understand how to make it. I think I was not particularly successfull. I don't feel very good about my final paper. Partially this is because I changed my thesis, abandoning half my research and writing (on Freud). I still feel uncomfortable with literary criticism, and I feel like I was trying to prove some arbitrary statement about literature, not because the statement itself was genuinely interesting or enlightening, but simply to go through the motions of forcing some external structure onto a work.
Part way through the semester I began writing a more narrative response to Dostoevsky. The project was aborted, however, because the Brothers Karamazov on the one hand took more of my energy and on the other hand turned out to contain such a quantity of ideas I will have to grapple with before continuing my response. I am turning in the completed part of the paper along with my analytical paper. That narrative form was much more comfortable and felt more appropriate to me than a ``normal'' paper.
My group presentation on Freud and Dostoevsky went very well. I spent a long time preparing, read lots of sources, and it payed off. I planned an interesting, engaging, educational experience for my classmates. The presentation used Dostoevsky and Freud's ``stick with two ends'' back on Freud, psychoanalysing Freud, ``turning the tables on Freud'' as Joanna called it. This forum was perhaps much more comfortable for me than the analytical paper because I did not force myself to make up a thesis and pretend it was very important to me.