"Signs of the Material World: Dostoevsky, Science, and the 19th c. Novel"

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 and Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Sarah Lawrence College. Dr. Frazier’s research centers on Russian and comparative literature, including comparative Romanticism and interdisciplinary approaches to the nineteenth-century novel. Her publications include the books "Romantic Encounters: Writers, Readers, and the 'Library for Reading'” (Stanford, 2007) and "Signs of the Material World: Dostoevsky, Science, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel" (Toronto, 2025).