User:Harold the Sheep/sandbox

Utterances are shaped by the not-yet-spoken and by the already-spoken. No speaker is ever the first to talk about the subject of his discourse. Each encounters a world that is already-spoken-about, already "articulated, disputed, elucidated and evaluated in various ways". Every time someone speaks, they respond to something spoken before and they take a stand in relation to earlier utterances. The way those earlier utterances are sensed—as hostile or sympathetic, authoritative or feeble, socially and temporally close or distant—shapes the content and style of what is said. Words and topics are "already populated", indeed they are "overpopulated" with the thoughts and intentions of others. "No living word relates to its object in a singular way". Between the speaking subject, the word, and its object there exists "an elastic environment of other words about the same object... it is precisely in the process of living interaction with this specific environment that the word may be individualized and given stylistic shape." In this "tension-filled" and "agitated" environment, the speaker's word "merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group; and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers..."(p 276) Words thus "conceptualize" their object in complex and indirect ways. Any utterance, when analyzed in depth in its social context "reveals to us many half-concealed or completely concealed words of others with varying degrees of foreignness." The utterance is faintly inscribed with "distant and barely audible echoes of changes of speech subjects and dialogic overtones". Thus dialogue is not a mere script—"compositionally expressed dialogue"—where there is simply a succession of speeches. The complexities generated from the already-spoken-about, and by the listener's active understanding, create an internal dialogism of the word.

"Native speakers do not apply rules, they enter the stream of communication." Conventions can be internalized, but when people talk or write they do so to accomplish something. They do not 'decode', they understand and respond.

"Only if one begins with the faith that behind all apparent unsystematicity there must be a system, is there any good reason to presume that a system of higher rules necessarily exists."

For Freud, the unconscious is not merely that which is not conscious. He refers to that as the descriptive unconscious and it is only the starting postulate for real investigation into the psyche. He further distinguishes the unconscious from the pre-conscious: the pre-conscious is merely latent, not present to consciousness but capable of becoming so; the unconscious is comprised of psychic material that is made completely inaccessible to consciousness by the act of repression. The distinctions and inter-relationships between these three regions of the psyche—the conscious, the pre-conscious, and the unconscious—form what Freud calls the topographical model of the psyche.

childhood influences

 * speaking of Darovoy "that tiny and unimportant spot left a very deep and strong impression on me for the rest of my life." (16) D visited Darovoy while writing BK and a number of places and people he remembered from the time turn up in the book. The character of Lizaveta Smerdyakova, for example, is based on such a person.
 * the story of Saint Sergey and the bear (26)
 * his first deep intuition of God came as a child of 8 reading the Book of Job. The seed sown here flowered into Ivan Karamazov's impassioned rejection of God's world and his Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, but also into Alyosha's "submission to the awesomeness of the infinite" (30) and Zosima's teaching of the necessity of faith before the mystery of God's wisdom. "It is Dostoevsky's genius as a writer to have been able to feel and express both these extremes of rejection and acceptance."
 * Schiller's The Robbers. He saw the play at age 10 and later commented on the "tremendous impression" it made on his "spiritual side".(34) Both Schiller and the play itself are frequently alluded to in BK. The characters of Dimitri and Ivan bear comparison to Karl Moor and Franz Moor, something Fyodor Pavlovich comments on, albeit ironically. He describes Ivan as his "most respectful Karl Moor" and Dimitri as "the unrespectful Franz Moor" and himself as the father Graf von Moor. His own character is the complete opposite of Graf, Dimitri's resembles Karl's, and Ivan's resembles Franz's. Frank: "There is Karl Moor's stormy revolt against divine and human fatherhood, offset by his acknowledgement of a divine power stronger than his own will... There is also Franz Moor's use of the cynical doctrines of eighteenth century materialism to justify his parricidal villainy, though despite his atheism he is unable to overcome his terror of hell and eternal damnation. It finally proves impossible to eradicate that spark of conscience about which Kant had spoken."

"A Schillerian atmosphere envelops TBK from the first page to the last" (773)

The Robbers, like BK, depicts the tragedy of a family split by deadly rivalry between father and sons, between the sons themselves (both desire Amalia, just as D and I are rivals for Katarina Ivanovna), and also deals with the theme of parricide.

References to Schiller's poetry are scattered throughout the novel and emphasise its themes. Dimitri's conflict between the ideal of the Madonna and the ideal of Sodom illustrated through fragments of "Eleusinian Feast" and "Ode to Joy. Ivan "returning his ticket" to God is an allusion to Schiller's poem Resignation. The epigraph of "The Grand Inquisitor" is two lines from Longing - "Believe what the heart tells you. Heavan does not make any pledges". Ivan quotes Schiller to Katerina Ivanovna.

Sensualism
(312)

Atheism/belief
rejection/acceptance of God (382)

Fyodor K
(709)

Rakitin
(730)

Alyosha
as D's attempt to divert contemporary radical youth away from an atheistic approach to justice and attainment of the good. (736)

Zossima
Father Ambrose of the Optina monastery. The Church must be shown as a positive social ideal. (771) Ivan's theocratic ideas - symptomatic of the split within himself of reason (state) and moral sensibility (church)


 * the problem of theodicy, a re-statement by D of the dilemma of Job. Father Zosima recounts the story of Job, emphasizing its lesson of true faith as the conclusion.
 * D refutes ideas by dramatising their consequences on the fate of his characters.