21. The Plots of Novels Teach Novelistic Justice, Not Poetic Justice

Kapitel in diesem Buch

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Preface xi
4. Introduction xiii
5. Part I. Literary Plots Deserve Still More Study
6. 1. Plots Arrange Literary Experience 3
7. 2. Plot Summaries Need More Serious Study 6
8. 3. The Fabula Arranges the Events in the World the Characters Inhabit; the Siuzhet Arranges the Events in the World the Reader Encounters in the Text 16
9. 4. Authors Can Relate One Incident to Another Only Chronologically, Spatially, Causally, Associatively, or Narratively 19
10. 5. Plots Are Fractal, Formed from Incidents That Are Formed from Smaller, Similarly Shaped Incidents 29
11. 6. The Best Authorities Consider Plots and Incidents to Be Tripartite, with a Situation, a Need, and an Action 34
12. 7. But Siuzhets and the Incidents That Form Them Have Two Parts: An Expectation and Its Fulfillment or Frustration 38
13. Part II. The Plot of King Lear Operates Purposefully But Also Reflects the Creative Process
14. 8. For Integrity of Impact, Stages, Actors, and the Audience Need a Unity of Action 43
15. 9. Shakespeare Replaced the Greek Unity of Action with a New Thematic Unity Based on Parallelism 49
16. 10. Shakespeare Uses Conflict, the Righting of Wrongs, the Healing of an Inruption or Disruption, and Other Standard Plotting Devices, But His Recognition Scenes Move Us Most 53
17. 11. Shakespeare Prepares for His Recognition Scenes with Elaborate Lies 59
18. 12. In King Lear , Shakespeare Uses Elaborated Lies to Psychologize the Gloucester Subplot 64
19. 13. Tolstoy and Tate Preferred the Comforting Plots of Lear’s Sources to Shakespeare’s, But Shakespeare Had Considered That Variant and Rejected It 70
20. Part III. The Plot of Crime and Punishment Draws Rhetorical and Moral Power from the Nature of Novel Plots and from the European and Russian Tradition Dostoevsky Inherited and Developed
21. 14. European Novelists Elaborated or Assembled Incidents into Plots Long Before Critics Recognized the Sophistication of the New Genre in Plotting Such Subgenres as the Letter Novel and the Detective Novel 79
22. 15. Dostoevsky Shaped and Was Shaped by the Russian Version of the Nineteenth-Century Novel 86
23. 16. In Reinventing the Psychological Plot, Dostoevsky Challenged the Current Literary Leaders 96
24. 17. The Siuzhet of Part I of Crime and Punishment Programs the Reader to Read the Rest and to Participate Actively in a Vicious Murder 101
25. 18. The One-Sidedness of Desire and Violence in Crime and Punishment Is More Peculiar to Dostoevsky’s Plotting Than Dostoevshchina 108
26. 19. Critics Often Attack Crime and Punishment for a Rhetoric That Exploits Causality in Ways They Misunderstand 115
27. 20. The Epilogue of Crime and Punishment Crystallizes Its Ideological Plot 122
28. 21. The Plots of Novels Teach Novelistic Justice, Not Poetic Justice 129
29. Bibliography 141
30. Index 153
31. Works by Robert L. Belknap 167