| Popis: |
This chapter argues that the performative mode of the ritual insult exchange structures Fedor Dostoevsky's writing about how intellectuals listen to and record other people's words. It begins by addressing the playful, competitive recording of lower-class language in Dostoevsky's pre-katorga years and its extension in his descriptions of the prison. The chapter reflects on how Dostoevsky and the other prisoners “enregistered” the speech patterns of specific groups, creating and circulating verbal stereotypes through their mocking listening. The stenographic systems that courts and newspaper reporters would employ from the 1860s onward were part of the expansion of the use of the literary language to more readers as well as of the growing sensitivity of language users to the standard and the available antistandards. The chapter considers the writer's fantasies about stenography as a disembodied, technologically marvelous form of mediation. Finally, it analyzes a ritual insult contest of a sort that Dostoevsky engaged in in print with another writer, Nikolai Leskov, inspired by the question of which of them might be a better stenographer of the speech of priests. |
