Showing results for "The Possessed" in Literary History & Criticism

In arguably his most personal and lasting book, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than eighty texts by canonical authors-- texts he has had by heart since childhood. Gone are the polemics. Here, instead, in a memoir of sorts--an...

One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED―ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!―TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS No one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of...

In Possessed, Rebecca R. Falkoff asks how hoarding - once a paradigm of economic rationality - came to be defined as a mental illness. Hoarding is unique among the disorders included in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5 because its diagnosis requires the existence of a material entity: the hoard. Possessed therefore considers the hoard as an aesthetic object produced by clashing perspectives about the meaning or value of objects.

The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a dark and intense novel about political extremism, moral collapse, manipulation, and the destructive power of ideas when they become more important than human life.The story is set in a provincial Russian town where a group of intellectuals, radicals, idealists, and restless young men become drawn into a network of political agitation. At the center of the turmoil are figures such as Nikolai Stavrogin, a mysterious and deeply troubled man, and Pyotr Verkhovensky, a calculating revolutionary who attempts to organize a secret political group.As tensions ...