{"id":35359,"date":"2025-09-15T14:50:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T18:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/2025\/09\/15\/a-chat-with-melissa-frazier-about-signs-of-the-material-world\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T14:50:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T18:50:12","slug":"a-chat-with-melissa-frazier-about-signs-of-the-material-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/a-chat-with-melissa-frazier-about-signs-of-the-material-world\/","title":{"rendered":"A Chat with Melissa Frazier about Signs of the Material World"},"content":{"rendered":"

The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement\u00a0<\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Today Vadim Shneyder sat down with\u00a0Melissa Frazier to discuss her book, Signs of the Material World: Dostoevsky, Science, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel<\/em><\/a> which came out with University of Toronto Press earlier this year.<\/p>\n

VS<\/strong>: Congratulations on your new book! Tell us a bit about the history of your project. What kinds of questions motivated the book? Which fields, ideas, and traditions are you in dialogue with?<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

MF<\/strong>: I didn\u2019t start the project with any \u201cmotivating questions,\u201d or really with any plan at all; it was more a matter of my reading and re-reading a shifting and expanding set of texts.\u00a0 I am very fortunate to teach at an institution that affords faculty near-total autonomy in designing our courses, and it was in a class on \u201cDostoevsky and the West\u201d in 2008 that I first found myself thinking about something that I now recognize as \u201c(S)cience.\u201d\u00a0 That story emerged only very slowly, however, and only by way of many often serendipitous intellectual encounters.\u00a0 In 2012, for example, I discovered the rich vein of scholarship on George Eliot and science by way of a piece that I just happened to hear on NPR, \u201cYour Brain on Jane Austen<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Or: I first heard the name Bruno Latour at a series of panels devoted to Melville and Thoreau at the 2016 MLA conference.\u00a0 Which is to say, I\u2019m a reader above all, and a writer only by dint of an approach that is neither inductive nor deductive but abductive, exactly as I define it in Chapter Four: \u201cAbduction is the movement of the mind as, often in a flash of insight, it connects and also shapes our empirical observations.\u201d<\/p>\n

VS<\/strong>: Most of your readers are probably used to seeing \u201cart\u201d and \u201cscience\u201d framed in opposing terms. And as you note at the beginning of your book, \u201cDostoevsky is not particularly known for his fondness for science of any sort.\u201d Yet, your book invites us to think of nineteenth-century science in a more expansive way. The \u201cscience\u201d and \u201cnineteenth-century novel\u201d of the book\u2019s subtitle are not in any kind of simple opposition. Could you say a few words about the relationship between the realist novel and this expanded concept of science as it emerges in your work?<\/p>\n

MF<\/strong>: While I think that readers often underestimate the complexity of nineteenth-century realism, the larger problem is a widespread belief that science offers simple and unambiguous truths.\u00a0 Science doesn\u2019t always work that way, however, not in the nineteenth century, and not now.\u00a0 To give my favorite quote from George Henry Lewes: \u201c\u2026 the external world exists, and among <\/em>the modes of its existence is the one we perceive.\u201d\u00a0 That multiplicity is fundamentally novelistic, I think.<\/p>\n

VS<\/strong>: The concept of \u201cfellowship\u201d that you discern in the work of novelists like George Eliot and Fyodor Dostoevsky seems particularly crucial to your broader argument. It also seems germane to contemporary ecological concerns. Could you elaborate on the meaning of fellowship in the works of these writers?<\/p>\n

MF<\/strong>: While I present the idea of \u201cfellowship\u201d as indeed germane to ecological concerns, I take the term from Nina Auerbach\u2019s reading of Middlemarch <\/em>in \u201cDorothea\u2019s Lost Dog\u201d (2006).\u00a0 Like Raskolnikov, Dorothea starts the novel with a sense of superiority; what she needs to learn, in Eliot\u2019s words, is \u201cthe deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.\u201d\u00a0 In more strictly literary terms, I would also emphasize the relationship that Eliot and Dostoevsky established with their respective reading publics.\u00a0 Both were remarkable for the degree of personal engagement that their writing elicited from real, flesh-and-blood readers, and here I think of Gillian Beer\u2019s claim in George Eliot <\/em>(1986) that what Eliot took from Feuerbach was an understanding of novel-writing as a \u201cjoint enterprise of production\u201d that \u201c\u2019furnishes space\u2019 for the activity of reader and writer together\u201d (75).<\/p>\n

VS<\/strong>: One of the key figures in your book is George Henry Lewes, a pioneering figure in the discipline of physiological psychology. He was also a novelist (and George Eliot\u2019s common-law husband). You mention that he was a wide-ranging researcher and writer in an age that was already beginning to professionalize. For her part, George Eliot was, in addition to her work as a novelist, a wide-ranging essayist and translator of important works in philosophy like Spinoza\u2019s Ethics and Feuerbach\u2019s The Essence of Christianity. Dostoevsky was a famously omnivorous reader. Does your book have something broader to say about the value of intellectual generalism?<\/p>\n

MF<\/strong>: Short answer:\u00a0 yes, although I think that the catchphrase in 2025 is \u201cinterdisciplinarity\u201d and, I would add, \u201ccollaboration.\u201d Longer answer:\u00a0 I am interested less in intellectual generalism than I am in an on-going de-stabilization of received categories.\u00a0 As Cary Wolfe writes in Ecological Poetics<\/em><\/a>: \u201cthe term \u2018environment\u2019 reminds us that what counts as \u2018nature\u2019 is always a product of the contingent and selective practices deployed in the embodied actions of a living system.\u201d\u00a0 The same holds true for fields of expertise:\u00a0 there is nothing \u201cnatural\u201d about the walls that demarcate the disciplines as our current academy would have them, not that those walls are the invention of our scholarly minds, either.\u00a0 Like Lewes as Rick Rylance describes him in Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850-1880<\/em> (2002), I aspire to a particularly rigorous form of disciplinarity, one that is \u201cboth creatively adequate and radically provisional\u201d (259).\u00a0<\/p>\n

VS<\/strong>: You make the case that the fairly neglected German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach was an important influence on the development of Dostoevsky\u2019s understanding of the relationship between mind and world. What did Dostoevsky take from Feuerbach?<\/p>\n

MF<\/strong>: Above all, Feuerbach\u2019s emphasis on what he called \u201csensuality\u201d (Sinnlichkeit<\/em>).\u00a0 As Feuerbach writes in Principles of the Philosophy of the Future <\/em>(1843), his new philosophy is \u201ccertainly based on reason as well, but on a reason whose being <\/em>is the same as the being of man<\/em>; that is, it is based not on an empty, colorless, nameless reason, but on a reason that is of the very blood of man.<\/em>\u201d In Dostoevskyan terms, we might consider Ivan\u2019s sticky little leaves in spring, for example, not to mention all those bodies, including our own as we respond to the twists and turns of his \u201csensational\u201d plots. Note also the Underground Man in a rare moment of truth: \u201cwhere there is no love, there is no reason,\u201d he tells Liza.<\/p>\n

VS<\/strong>: I was fascinated by the connection you bring out between an alternative nineteenth-century conception of science, which emphasizes the mutual interaction of embodied minds and the world, and novelists, like Dostoevsky, who use the intensity of their plots as a way of involving the reader\u2019s nervous system in the activity of reading. Do you think that the history of these kinds of embodied intellectual activity gains new significance in the age of large language models (LLMs), with their unembodied manipulation of language?<\/p>\n

Relatedly, your book is, in many ways, about the importance of the activity of reading, and particularly a kind of reading that is not just distanced and contemplative but is a mode of active involvement of the reading self in the world. It seems to many people that reading itself is undergoing a profound transformation today. Has your work on this project shaped how you talk to your students about reading, or how you approach the pedagogy of reading?<\/p>\n

MF<\/strong>:\u00a0 In a world where some would respond to what they see as the limitations of materiality not just by promoting the unembodied manipulation of language, but by preserving their consciousness in digital form, for example, or by finding a new planet to exploit, yes, the history of these kinds of embodied intellectual activity gains new significance.\u00a0 I am looking forward later this fall to teaching Jeanette Winterson\u2019s Frankisstein <\/em>(2017) together with Frankenstein <\/em>(1818) in a revamped version of my Romanticism class, and I hope that I will have more fully formed thoughts by then. In the meantime, I don\u2019t think that we are going to solve the climate crisis by practicing new, computer-assisted forms of disembodiment; in broader political terms, I also stand with Mustafa Nayyem and the Revolution of Dignity: \u201cLikes don\u2019t count.\u201d\u00a0 And, yes, I have thoughts on changing ways of reading, not that I\u2019m operating off anything other than my own anecdotal experience.\u00a0 But:\u00a0 what strikes me is that my students\u2019 experience of reading is often more distanced and more fragmented than the immersive sort of reading that I grew up with and still practice.\u00a0 As scholars of literature, we have something desperately important to teach our students:\u00a0 what and how we read matters.<\/p>\n

\n

Melissa Frazier is Professor of Russian language and Russian and\u00a0comparative literature at Sarah Lawrence College; she is currently engaged in\u00a0teaching her way to a new focus on contemporary Belarusian, Polish and Ukrainian literature.<\/p>\n

Vadim Shneyder is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He is the author of\u00a0Russia\u2019s Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov<\/em>\u00a0(Northwestern University Press, 2020) <\/a>as well as articles on Russian and Belarusian literature, economic criticism, and literary theory. He is secretary-treasurer of the North American Dostoevsky Society.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement\u00a0here. Today Vadim Shneyder sat down with\u00a0Melissa Frazier to discuss her book, Signs of the Material World: Dostoevsky, Science, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel which came out with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":340,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloggers-karamazov"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/340"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}