Holy Foolishness

This book examines the ways in which Dostoevsky's adoption and reinvention of the medieval Russian holy fool - in Russian Orthodoxy, a person who feigned madness or folly as an ascetic feat of self-humiliation, serves as a locus for a critique of his culture's increasing reliance on the scienti1c paradigms of Claude Bernard's physiology, and as a source of formal narrative innovation in his novels. The author 1rst explores the paradoxical hagiography of the holy fool, whose saintly acts are disguised under the mask of demonic folly. She then traces the rise of medical science in the nineteenth century and the increasing authority of the new scienti1c models of human behavior, especially the all-important notion of 'the normal and the pathological'. In its theoretical orientation, the book both builds from and criticizes Bakhtin's work on carnival.

ISBN 0804720592   Pages 228 ISBN13 9780804720595 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Stanford University Press   Weight (grammes) 451 Imprint Stanford University Press   Published in Palo Alto Format Hardback   Height (mm) 224 Publication date 30 Sep 1993   Width (mm) 148 Library of Congress PG3328.Z7H   Spine width (mm) 21 DEWEY 891.733   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC21

		Notes on Translation and Transliteration
		Introduction		1
1		The Holiness of the Fool: The Hagiographic Text		17
2		The Word of Science: Folly as Abnormality		32
3		Crime and Punishment: Psychology on Trial		51
4		The Idiot and the Problem of Recognition		71
5		The Devils: Sacred and Profane Imposture		99
6		Recapitulating: The Brothers Karamazov		124
		Conclusion		171
		Notes		177
		Works Cited		197
		Index		209

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