Seminars

OX-04 and CAM-04 ~ “The Great Books: The Image of God in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov” with Paul Contino

Dostoevsky’s great final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, presents modernity’s most compelling and complex depiction of what it means to be created in God’s image and likeness.  Though fallen, we are called to conform to the image of Christ -- without which, in the words of one of the characters, “we would be altogether lost.”  For this seminar, you are asked to read the novel over the summer, before the seminar meets. In the seminar, we will focus on particular chapters in the novel, and observe the remarkable ways in which the novel is linked to the Bible, but also to the works of writers like Augustine, Dante, Milton, Hopkins, and Elie Wiesel. As his epigraph to the novel, Dostoevsky offers Christ’s words from John’s Gospel:  “Verily, verily I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (12.24).  What might this mean in one’s ordinary, daily life? What is the meaning of suffering? Why can the gift of freedom be such a burden at times? Are human persons capable of the practice of Christ-like, active love? How does grace manifest itself? In the course of our discussion of this wondrous novel, we will see how Dostoevsky’s understanding of the true self is deeply akin to the words of St. Paul: “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2.20).

Paul J. Contino is Professor of Great Books at Pepperdine University. Before coming to Pepperdine, he received his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame, after which he taught for twelve years in Christ College, the honors college of Valparaiso University. Now in his sixth year at Pepperdine, Paul also serves as Editor of the journal Christianity and Literature and as Associate Director of the Center for Faith and Learning. With Susan Felch, he has edited and introduced Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith (Northwestern UP, 2001). His work has appeared in Religion and Literature, Studies in the Novel, Renascence, Religion and the Arts, The Cresset, Commonweal, America, and Image. His editorials have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.

 

 

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