Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and the Ideological Problem of The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, strives to resolve the question of God’s existence. But many critics have acknowledged that Dostoevsky seems to present Ivan’s skeptical voice with equal, if not greater, force than Alyosha’s affirmative voice—a feature of the novel that is difficult to explain in the context of Dostoevsky’s avowed Christianity. There is an overwhelming consensus among critics that The Brothers is a thesis-novel. But in order to establish the novel as a defense of faith, the critic must ultimately dismiss the strength of Ivan’s voice; and in attempting to demonstrate that the voice of doubt prevails, the critic must similarly dismiss the value of Alyosha’s faith. By utilizing Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony, I propose an interpretation of The Brothers that does not attempt to resolve this opposition. Because Bakhtin’s theory is often seen to sanction all interpretations as equally valid, it has been used to endorse each of these mutually incompatible positions on the novel. But I hope to show that the theory of polyphony is, in its essence, diametrically opposed to the interpretation of Dostoevsky’s work as either a defense of faith or a concession to doubt. Further, I propose—contra Bakhtin—that the polyphonic novel can be thesis-driven, if its very thesis resides in its formal polyphony. The thesis of The Brothers, I argue, does not resolve the question of God’s existence, but posits instead that the inability to resolve this question is fundamental to human nature

Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology

The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology was an initiative to independently replicate selected experiments from a number of high-profile papers in the field of cancer biology. In the end 50 experiments from 23 papers were repeated. The final two outputs from the project recount in detail the challenges the project team encountered while repeating these experiments ('Challenges for assessing replicability in preclinical cancer biology': https://elifesciences.org/articles/67995), and report the results of a meta-analysis that combined the results from all the experiments ('Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology': https://elifesciences.org/articles/71601). The project was a collaboration between the Center for Open Science and Science Exchange with all papers published by eLife