Contemporary dostoevskian literature: the post-postmodern repositioning of dostoevskian ethics in novels by David Foster Wallace, J. M. Coetzee and Atiq Rahimi

Acts of violence and outrage are central features of Dostoevsky’s post-Siberian novels. These acts testify to the significant role of the ethical in academic and evaluative considerations of his works. Such considerations have often tended towards Christocentrism: from Vladimir Soloviev to Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky has consistently been studied in the light of his professed Russian Orthodox credence. However, Dostoevsky’s influence, particularly his ethical influence, over authors and artists from the past 30 years stands as a challenge to the uncomplicated association between his ethics and his faith. Fiction both composed within and portraying a predominantly secular context which nevertheless acknowledges Dostoevskian ethics thus becomes the catalyst for a reassessment of those ethics as departing from an ontotheological basis.

This thesis undertakes precisely such a reassessment, using novels by David Foster Wallace, Atiq Rahimi and J.M. Coetzee as source material for contemporary Dostoevskian ethics. Using a theoretical framework constructed from a comparative reading of Bakhtinian and Levinasian ethical theory, cross-analysed with Bakhtin’s seminal study of Dostoevsky’s ‘polyphonic’ novel form, it reads Dostoevsky’s ethical influence over contemporary literature as a consequence of the way polyphony represents a Levinasian sense of responsibility to all, for all, more than others. The thesis is split into four Parts. Part I argues for an equation between novelistic polyphony and the Levinasian theory of ‘Saying’, the pre-discursive inauguration of subjectivity through the illimitable responsibility of response to the Other’s call. Part II traces the development of contemporary Dostoevskian literature from post-Nietzschean modernism, through postmodernism to the eventual resurgence of ethical questioning in a ‘post-postmodern’ context. Part III assesses how the Levinasian/Bakhtinian emphasis on pre-discursivity and the aesthetic demand for cognitive representation manifests as an irreconcilable tension between ethics and aesthetics in the contemporary works, a tension that can be traced back to Dostoevsky’s own post-Siberian novels. Part IV, therefore, offers a close-reading of the contemporary works that further interrogates this tension, reading contemporary Dostoevskian literature as an expression of the epistemic humility that reveals Dostoevsky’s ethical legacy.