Crime and Punishment Lecture

The three scenes I want us to look at during the course of my talk this morning are: Raskolnikov’s confession to Sonya; Svidrigailov’s last night alive; and the Epilogue– Raskolnikov in Siberia

Louise Cowan Believes

Louise Cowan believes 1. There is a body of “classic texts” that constitute a necessary knowledge for members of Western civilization. 2. These texts interact with--and welcome--sufficiently qualified new texts. 3. Underlying these texts is an oral tradition that sustains the unconscious life of a people. 4. A culture is formed by all the public virtues—both written and oral--cohering to form a cosmos and a code. 5. Poetry is the foundation of this conscious and unconscious cosmos in which people live. 6. Two kinds of learning exist: the first with the purpose of transmitting a sense of this unconstitute cosmos in which one’s world exists; the purpose of the second is to constitute a self. The two make up a liberal education. 7. All young people should be given a liberal education

Dostoevsky lecture for IPS

Dostoevsky was the first writer to discover that the novel could be an instrument of discovery–even a kind of prophecy. This is to say that he discovered the novel as a mode of poetry–and in a poem, form and content cannot be separated: the way in which something is said is as much constitutive of the meaning as is the content. Dostoevsky once wrote that for the novelist, the germ, the insight, came first–and one might call that the poem. Then there was the work of constructing the work of art itself, which one might call the novel. Yet the novelist who is also a poet views his potential work with the eyes of his entire culture; there is no way for a writer to write like Homer, say, or Dante in our time–or in Dostoevsky’s