Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:46:25.941Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Anna Karenina Reads on the Train: Readerly Subjectivity and the Poetics of the Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Yi-Ping Ong
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

What does it mean to be a reader of a novel? he famous scene of Anna Karenina reading on the train takes up this question. Whereas Tolstoy's scene is traditionally viewed as yet another example of the pleasures and dangers of novel reading, from empathic identiication to romantic self-aestheticization, I argue that the scene investigates the phenomenology of novel reading, the nature of readerly subjectivity, and the poetics of the classic realist novel—all in ways that depart from other canonical literary depictions of novel reading. Bringing together the poetics of the realist novel with complex issues of selfknowledge and deliberation, the scene reveals a new form of readerly subjectivity that entails the imagined nonexistence of the empirical reader. Drawing on Bakhtin, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and others, I show the implications of this form of readerly subjectivity for not only an original interpretation of Tolstoy's much-read scene but also our understanding of novel reading.

Type
Special Topic: Cultures of Reading
Information
PMLA , Volume 133 , Issue 5: Special Topic Cultures of Reading , October 2018 , pp. 1083 - 1098
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Armstrong, Judith M. The Unsaid Anna Karenina. St. Martin's Press, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, M.M.“Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”. Art and Answerability, translated by Vadiam Liapunov, edited by Holquist, Michael, U of Texas P, 1990, pp. 4–256.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, M.M. “Epic and Novel”. The Dialogic Imagination, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, edited by Holquist, , U of Texas P, 1981, pp. 3–40.Google Scholar
Baym, Nina. Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America. Cornell UP, 1984.Google Scholar
Browning, Gary L. “The Death of Anna Karenina: Anna's Share of the Blame”. The Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 30, no. 3, 1986, pp. 327–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Camus, Albert. The Rebel. translated by Bower, Anthony, Knopf, 1961.Google Scholar
Cavell, Stanley. “Knowledge as Transgression”. Pursuits of Happiness, Harvard UP, 1981, pp. 73–109.Google Scholar
Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged ed., Harvard UP, 1979.Google Scholar
Cruise, Edwina. “Tracking the English Novel in Anna Karenina: Who Wrote the English Novel That Anna Reads?” Anniversary Essays on Tolstoy, edited by Orwin, Donna Tussing, Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. 159–82.Google Scholar
Denner, Michael. “Accidental Art: Tolstoy's Poetics of Unintentionality”. Philosophy and Literature, vol. 27, no. 2, 2003, pp. 284–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader, 1837-1914. Oxford UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. 1980. U of Chicago P, 1988.Google Scholar
Gustafson, Richard F. Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology. Princeton UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Hager, Kelly. Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition. Ashgate, 2010.Google Scholar
Hong, Howard V., and Edna H. Hong. “Historical Introduction.” Kierkegaard, Without Authority, pp. ix-xix.Google Scholar
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.Google Scholar
Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.Google Scholar
Jackson, Robert Louis. “The Night Journey: Anna Karenina's Return to Saint Petersburg.” Approaches to Teaching Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, edited by Knapp, Liza and Mandelker, Amy, MLA, 2003, pp. 150–60.Google Scholar
James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction”. The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, edited by Gard, Roger, Penguin, 1987, pp. 186–206.Google Scholar
James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. Novels, 1881-1886, edited by Stafford, William T., Library of America, 1985, pp. 191–800.Google Scholar
Jauss, Hans Robert. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. translated by Shaw, Michael, U of Minnesota P, 1982.Google Scholar
Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford UP, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kierkegaard, Soren. Either/Or. translated by Lowrie, Walter, part 2, Princeton UP, 1959.Google Scholar
Kierkegaard, Soren. “From the Papers of One Still Living—Andersen as a Novelist, with Continual Reference to His Latest Work: Only a Fiddler”. Early Polemical Writings, edited and translated by Watkin, Julia, Princeton UP, 1990, pp. 53–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Sickness unto Death. edited and translated by Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna H., Princeton UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Kierkegaard, Soren. Stages on Life's Way. edited and translated by Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna H., Princeton UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Kierkegaard, Soren. Without Authority. edited and translated by Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna H., Princeton UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Klem, Peter. “Prejudices and Particularities.” The Bloomsbury Review, Jan. 1981, pp. 7–8.Google Scholar
Mandelker, Amy. Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel. Ohio State UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Prose of the World. Edited by McCumber, John and Levin, David, translated by John O'Neill, Northwestern UP, 1973.Google Scholar
Moran, Richard. Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge. Princeton UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Morson, Gary Saul. Anna Karenina in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely. Yale UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Nabokov, Vladimir. “The Art of Fiction No. 40.” Interview by Herbert Gold. The Paris Review, vol. 41, 1967, pp. 92–111.Google Scholar
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Russian Literature. Edited by Bowers, Fredson, Harcourt, 1981.Google Scholar
Ngai, Sianne. “Merely Interesting”. Critical Inquiry, vol. 34, no. 4, 2008, pp. 777–817.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ong, Yi-Ping. The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy. Harvard UP, forthcoming 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Orwin, Donna Tussing. Tolstoy's Art and Thought, 18471880. Princeton UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “François Mauriac and Freedom”. Literary Essays, translated by Michelson, Annette, Philosophical Library, 1957, pp. 7–23.Google Scholar
Schlegel, Friedrich. “Letter about the Novel”. Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, translated by Behler, Ernst and Struc, Roman, Pennsylvania State UP, 1968, pp. 94–105.Google Scholar
Schlegel, Friedrich. On the Study of Greek Poetry. edited and translated by Barnett, Stuart, State U of New York P, 2001.Google Scholar
Sloane, David A.“Anna Reading and Women Reading in Russian Literature”. Approaches to Teaching Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, edited by Knapp, Liza and Mandelker, Amy, MLA, 2003, pp. 124–30.Google Scholar
Stewart, Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. translated by Pevear, Richard and Volokhonsky, Larissa, Penguin Books, 2000.Google Scholar
Tolstoy, Leo. Каренина [Anna Karenina]. Полное со-бра ние сочинений [Polnoe sobranie sochinenii; Complete Works], edited by V.G. Chertkov et al., vols. 18-19, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934-35. 90 vols. 1929–58.Google Scholar
Tolstoy, Leo. What Is Art? What Is Art? and Essays on Art. translated by Maude, Aylmer, Oxford UP, 1930, pp 70–312.Google Scholar
Valéry, Paul. The Art of Poetry. Princeton UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Valéry, Paul. “Propos sur la poésie”. Œuvres, vol. 1, Gallimard, 1957, pp. 1361–78.Google Scholar
Warner, William B.“Novels on the Market”. The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780, edited by Richetti, John, Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 87–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, A.N. Tolstoy. W.W. Norton, 1988.Google Scholar