Kate Holland’s lecture: Kate Holland “The Novel in the Longue-Durée: Veselovsky and Bakhtin’s Competing Origin Stories”

7 Apr 2016 - 17:00 / 7 Apr 2016 - 19:00



The Comparative Literature Course Union presents the Winter edition
of the Emerging Research in Comparative Literature Series

a public lecture by Professor Kate Holland

“The Novel in the Longue-Durée: Veselovsky and  Bakhtin’s Competing Origin Stories”

Thursday, 7th April  2016 5 p.m.
Northrop Frye  Hall, Room 113
Light refreshments will be provided

Alexander Veselovsky (1838-1906) was the founding father of Comparative Literature in Russia and pioneer of an approach to literary scholarship he called Historical Poetics, which sees literature as the formal expression of the social and psychological needs of peoples as they develop over deep time. Beginning with a discussion of Historical Poetics, this talk goes on to examine Veselovsky’s history and theory of the novel, comparing his account of the genre’s origins in the popular genres of late antiquity with Bakhtin’s account of its roots in the dynamic heteroglossia of the disintegrating Roman Empire in “Discourse in the Novel” and “Epic and Novel.”

Kate Holland is Associate Professor of Russian Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and Genre in the 1870s (Northwestern University Press, 2013) and articles on articles on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Herzen, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sand, Zola and Veselovsky. She is currently coordinating a series of events in North America to mark the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.  She is a founder member of the Working Group on Historical Poetics, and recently contributed to Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics, edited by Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov (Fordham University Press, 2015).