Sunday, September 17, 2006

Demons II


Also, check out this highly interesting essay by Joyce Carol Oats on Dostoevsky's 'Demons', in which she describes the book's plot as a tragic rite of exorcism - a line of thought that certainly merits further consideration. Sadly, Oats mainly uses René Girard's analysis of ritual, which I find anthropologically poorly informed (I hated his 'La violence et le Sacré', a book which goes out of it's way to make the facts fit the theory, using a methodology which had been discredited in anthropology 40 years earlier). If I have the time, i'll try to develop a Maussian theory of 'Demons' as a rite of exorcims. Sadly, I'm working too much at the moment, so probably I won't have the time.

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