Narrative Faith: Dostoevsky, Camus, and Singer

ISBN-13: 9781611496642 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 226 str.

David Stromberg

Opis

Narrative Faith engages with the faith and doubt dynamic to consider how literary works with complex structures explore different moral visions. Starting with Dostoevsky's Demons (1872), the study describes a literary petite histoire that problematizes faith in two ways - discourse within the story and strategies used to tell that story - causing readers to doubt the narrators and their narratives. The study further examines Albert Camus's The Plague (1947) and Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Penitent (1973/83) - works by twentieth-century authors who similarly intensify questions of faith through narrators that generate doubt. The two novelists share parallel preoccupations with Dostoevsky's art and similar personal philosophies while their works constitute two responses to the cataclysm of the Second World War - extending questions of faith into the postwar era. The study's last section looks beyond narrative inquiry to consider themes of confession and revision that appear in all three novels and open onto horizons beyond faith and doubt - to hope.