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Debates in Dostoevsky’s Journalism. Discourse or a Tool for Communication?
https://doi.org/10.28995/2686-7249-2020-2-45-58
Abstract
Due to the polyphonic nature of Dostoevsky’s poetics his works are full of dialogues, arguments, qui pro quo scenes, i.e. debates of all sorts. Meanwhile, since Antiquity, the dispute as a speech genre has been associated with rhetoric – being used in politics, courts, education, etc. Debates are a rhetoric tool for the comparison and evaluation of controversial statements. At the same time, it is a discursive practice used by several persons in the speech quarrellings. The article refers to some episodes from Dostoevsky’s A Writer’s Diary – “The Environment”, “A Paradoxalist”, and “A Piccola Bestia” – to explore the role of debates in Dostoevsky’s journalism. What it traces there is Dostoevsky’s bold anti-rhetoric stance which forms his manner of writing. His protagonists polemicize, make arguments that are becoming increasingly artificial and tense in the positions being approved in the dispute. The polemicists fall silent, but victory is not awarded to anyone. The seeming a winner in a dispute, takes a point of view that contradicts the concept of universal values.
Dostoevsky demonstrates an attitude to rhetoric similar to that of Plato and his school. Rhetoric can captivate, but it is always false. The debate is a process, a discourse, but not a means of finding the truth.
About the Author
G. S. ProkhorovRussian Federation
Georgii S. Prokhorov, Dr. of Sci. (Philology), associate professor
bld. 30, Zeleonaya Str., Kolomna, Moscow Region
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Supplementary files
For citation: Prokhorov G.S. Debates in Dostoevsky’s Journalism. Discourse or a Tool for Communication? RSUH/RGGU Bulletin: “Literary Teory. Linguistics. Cultural Studies”, Series. 2020;(2):45-58. https://doi.org/10.28995/2686-7249-2020-2-45-58
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