Slavic Department Lecture: "Signs of the Material World: Dostoevsky, Science and the 19th Century Novel"
- Event Type
- Lecture
- Sponsor
- Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
- Location
- Lucy Ellis Lounge, LCLB
- Date
- Mar 10, 2026 5:00 pm
- Speaker
- Melissa Frazier
- Contact
- David Cooper
- dlcoop@illinois.edu
- Originating Calendar
- Slavic Events
Drawing on Dostoevsky’s relationship with science, Signs of the Material World explores the literary impacts of nineteenth-century materialism. Dostoevsky’s scientific interlocutors range from Auguste Comte and the “vulgar” materialists to Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, George Henry Lewes, Charles Sanders Peirce, and the Russian Nikolai Strakhov; in literary terms, Dostoevsky writes in conversation with a wide range of contemporary writers across Europe and the United States, including Lev Tolstoy, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Friedrich Schiller. This talk will sketch the broad contours of Dostoevsky’s combined literary and scientific practice before turning to explore one aspect of that practice in particular: Dostoevsky’s recourse, like Dickens, to an “indexical” allegory that lends itself to the more contingent and relational kind of materiality that Dostoevsky calls “living life.”
Melissa Frazier is The Ilja Wachs Chair in Outstanding Teaching and Donning at Sarah Lawrence College. Her teaching and research interests center on Russian and comparative literature, with a special focus on the nineteenth century, including comparative Romanticism and interdisciplinary approaches to the 19th century novel. She is the author of publications including Romantic Encounters: Writers, Readers, and the “Library for Reading” (Stanford University Press, 2007; awarded the 2007 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for “Best Work in Romanticism Studies,” by the International Conference of Romanticism), and Signs of the Material World: Dostoevsky, Science and the 19th Century Novel (University of Toronto Press, 2025). Her current interests include twenty-first century Eastern European literature and contemporary Ukrainian literature in particular.