Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780810134928)

In Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison, Steven Shankman reflects on his remarkable experience teaching texts by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vasily Grossman, and Emmanuel Levinas in prison to a mix of university students and inmates. These persecuted writers--Shankman argues that Dostoevsky's and Levinas's experiences of incarceration were formative--describe ethical obligation as an experience of being turned inside out by the face-to-face encounter. Shankman relates this experience of being turned inside out to the very significance of the word "God," to Dostoevsky's tormented struggles with religious faith, to Vasily Grossman's understanding of his Jewishness in his great novel Life and Fate, and to the interpersonal encounters the author has witnessed reading these texts with his students in the prison environment.

Turned Inside Out will appeal to readers with interests in the classic novels of Russian literature, in prisons and pedagogy, or in Levinas and phenomenology. At a time when the humanities are struggling to justify the centrality of their mission in today's colleges and universities, Steven Shankman by example makes an undeniably powerful case for the transformative power of reading great texts.


Author: Steven Shankman
ISBN-10: 0810134926
ISBN-13: 9780810134928
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Language: English
Published: 05/15/2017
Pages: 184
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.88lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 10/01/2017