Table of Contents
PL O TS
LEONARD HASTINGS SCHOFF MEMORIAL LECTURES
UNIVERSITY SEMINARS
LEONARD HASTINGS SCHOFF MEMORIAL LECTURES
The University Seminars at Columbia University sponsor an annual series of lectures, with the support of the Leonard Hastings Schoff and Suzanne Levick Schoff Memorial Fund. A member of the Columbia faculty is invited to deliver before a general audience three lectures on a topic of his or her choosing. Columbia University Press publishes the lectures.
Charles Larmore, The Romantic Legacy 1996
Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization 1996
David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain 1999
Ira Katznelson, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust 2003
Lisa Anderson, Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-First Century 2003
Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World 2004
David Rosand, The Invention of Painting in America 2004
George Rupp, Globalization Challenged: Conviction, Conflict, Community 2006
Lesley A. Sharp, Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Realm of Human Organ Transfer 2007
Robert W. Hanning, Serious Play: Desire and Authority in the Poetry of Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto 2010
Boris Gasparov, Beyond Pure Reason: Ferdinand de Saussures Philosophy of Language and Its Early Romantic Antecedents 2012
Douglas A. Chalmers, Reforming Democracies: Six Facts About Politics That Demand a New Agenda 2013
Philip Kitcher, Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach 2013
R O BERT L.
BELKNAP
PL O TS
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
ROBIN FEUER MILLER
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright 2016 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-54147-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Belknap, Robert L. author.
Title: Plots / Robert L. Belknap ; with an introduction by Robin Feuer Miller.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Series: Leonard Hastings Schoff memorial lectures | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015039972 | ISBN 9780231177825 (cloth : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780231177832 (pbk. : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780231541473 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Plots (Drama, novel, etc.) | FictionTechnique.
Classification: LCC PN3378 .B44 2016 | DDC 808.3dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039972
A Columbia University Press E-book.
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COVER DESIGN: CHANG JAE LEE
References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
TO CYNTHIA
CONTENTS
This book grows out of the 2011 Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures at the Columbia University Seminars. In deference to the spirit of interactive intellection those seminars have fostered since the 1940s, I have tried to keep some of the lectures oral quality and do without formal notes. The bibliography does include all the works I cite and a number of others that may interest the curious, but it does not pretend to cover the field. When I know of an English translation of one of the works that I cite, I list it in the bibliography even when I used the original and provided my own translation. When many editions or translations exist, I give chapter, scene, or other standard indicators in the text, as such information may be more helpful, though sometimes less precise, than a page number.
I am particularly grateful to the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Program, the Bellagio Center, the Kennan Institute at the Smithsonian Institute, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) for providing me with time and resources, sometimes explicitly for this book and sometimes for other undertakings that left their mark on it.
These lectures gestated over many years, while I studied or taught at Princeton, the University of Paris, and Columbia, Leningrad, and Hokkaido Universities, using their libraries and the Bibliothque Nationale, the Library of Congress, the Lenin (now National) Library in Moscow, several libraries and archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the New York Public Library in those days when its rich and accessible collections made it a world center for Slavic studies. This book carries a deep intellectual debt to all those institutions, as well as to the teachers, colleagues, and students whose words and ideas inform the text.
In somewhat different form, parts of several chapters have appeared in the Slavic Review, the Slavic and East European Journal, Dostoevsky Studies, Dostoevskii: Materialy i issledovaniia, and a Festschrift for Malcolm Jones published by Cambridge University Press. These articles and a number of conference papers have provoked responses from colleagues which corrected errors, added readings, and made this book a genuinely collective enterprise. Three educational inventions at Columbiathe undergraduate Core Curriculum, the graduate-level Harriman Institute, and the University Seminars for scholars and specialistsadded a breadth of disputatious learning to the professional intercourse in the Slavic Department. Finally, Deborah Martinsen read an early version and improved it immensely, while Nancy Workman has edited the final draft, caught errors, clarified confusions, and made it into a proper manuscript. Although I am deeply grateful to many, many colleagues, I claim full personal credit for all the errors and inadequacies in the text.
