Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This is an engaging book at a number of levels. Grenier takes the ward figure (dependent, marginal and female) and discovers a fascinating "plot" in the various uses of this figure in Russian literature, starting with Pushkin's "Queen of Spades." Pushkin's text generates a whole series of responses by later authors, who respond to him and to each other by endowing this character with a greater or lesser degree of subjectivity. Grenier asks: does the author treat the ward as an object to be manipulated in order to prove some ideological point, to serve as background or victim to the main event? Or does the author treat her as a subject, allowing her to have a voice in her own fate, a voice equal to the author's own? One of Grenier's most interesting discoveries is the extent to which Russian literature is embedded in intertextuality. Tolstoy learns from Dostoevsky and Anna Karenina is more polyphonic than War and Peace. Dostoevsky reads a (bad) translation of Jane Eyre and transforms and recombines themes and actual speeches and distributes them amongst a number of characters in Demons (The Possessed), whereas in Bronte's book only Jane, not Blanche or Bertha, has a voice. But the book is not just literary criticism of a very high order. Lots of books use Bakhtin, and by this time one may nod one's head knowingly whenever someone says "dialogue" or "polyphony" or "carnival" or "unfinalizability." Grenier takes Bakhtin back to his roots in Russian philosophy, and here is where the "personalism" of the subtitle comes in. The human being, any human being, even the most grotesque, is a subject in a world of subjects. What we think and say to ourselves and others is saturated in what those others think and say. And yet my voice is my own. The person is "unfinalizable" not in the postmodern sense that I am an amorphous blob that takes on any shape that society or language or I myself, at various times, impose on it. I am unfinalizable because no one else can say a final word about me, no one can usurp my voice and put me in the third person--"oh, she's a ward/a woman/a murderer/a fool, and therefore..." Grenier liberates Bakhtin from the straitjacket he seems to have fallen into lately--as does Olga Meerson in her book on Dostoevsky's Taboos. Very highly recommended.
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