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Course description

This course considers how Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky take up moral inquiry in their fiction introduces students to philosophical texts that informed their major fiction and asks why the novel as a literary genre may be a good forum for the discussion of ethics. We read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov as well as selected texts from Jean-Jacques Rousseau Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.

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Instructors

Justin Weir

Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
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