Turned Inside-Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison after Levinas

Abstract

When I participated in the Inside-Out Training Institute in the summer of 2006, most of the classes taught in the program were in criminal justice. And that made good sense. If the subject you are studying is criminal justice, it seems perfectly fitting for a professor to bring his or her college students inside to give them a firsthand experience of the prison environment. But the teaching of literary texts? This question haunted me the first time I taught an Inside-Out class. Why do it here, in this particular environment? But I wanted to teach literature and ethics inside, particularly the novels of Dostoevsky, and I was struck by Dostoyevsky’s alleged claim that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”³ So reading Dostoevsky in a literature class taught in a prison seemed a good fit, although it was only after I became an Inside-Out instructor that I discovered just how deeply relevant to the Inside-Out experience Dostoevsky’s great texts would prove to be.

“The ego [le moi] is … a being divesting itself, emptying itself of its being, turning itself inside out [à l’envers].”¹

“A feeble-minded person can be inspire….This is a type that exists in Russia. It is The Idiot of Dostoevsky. The human pierces the crust of being. Only an idiot can believe in this goodness.”²

Emmanuel Levinas