Conférence de Jonathan Paine: «Selling the Story – Balzac, Dostoevsky and Economic Criticism»

Conférence en anglais.

How does writing for money affect what is written?

Dr. Jonathan Paine’s talk draws on the main themes of his book, Selling the Story: Transaction and Narrative Value in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola, published by Harvard University Press in 2019. Combining close readings of works by Balzac and Dostoevsky with detailed analyses of the nineteenth-century publishing contexts in which prose fiction first became a product, his paper will discuss how the business of literature affects even literary devices such as genre, plot, and repetition. He argues that no book can be properly understood without reference to its point of sale: the author’s knowledge of the market, of reader expectations, and of his or her own efforts to define and achieve literary value. The proposition redefines economic criticism as an undervalued tool of literary criticism.

Jonathan Paine est Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College à l'Université d'Oxford et Senior Advisor à la Banque d'investissement Rothschild & Co. Il est le trésorier de la International Dostoevsky Society.

Lien Zoom à venir.