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David Herman

David Herman
David Herman

Associate Professor

E-mail:
Phone: 434-924-6687

Address:
PO Box 400783
Halsey Annex C
Room 107
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4783

Research Interests

19th-century Russian literature, Tolstoy, 18th-century Russian literature, medieval Russian literature, literary theory, language pedagogy.

My current project is a re-reading of Tolstoy, tentatively titled Tolstoy and the Imperfections of Fiction.  I am interested in the ethics of fiction, and argue that Tolstoy's narratives embrace a series of highest virtues (innocence, naturalness, sincerity, non-theatricality, silence, and others) that they simultaneously violate even though they try not to.  In a typical example, Tolstoy's stories repeatedly rail against adultery, yet also demonstrate that the act of reading and the act of writing are, in a crucial sense, adulterous.  How then to effectively resist adulterous thinking?  How to alert the world to the dangers if not through writing?  Ultimately Tolstoy compiles for us a series of objections to what might be called "the mind of literature," the complex of mental operations fiction must perform to exist, and in its place proposes an antithetical mode of being in the world, ethically preferable and resistant to the conditions of modern subjectivity, that would render literature and the ways it thinks impossible or superfluous - but that ought not need in theory to be communicated about.  Work on the book has been supported by an NEH Fellowship.

Education

  • BA, Russian, Haverford College, 1983
  • MA, Russian, Bryn Mawr College, 1985
  • PhD, Slavic Langs. and Lits., University of California, Berkeley, 1993

Selected Awards

  • NEH Fellowship, 2008-9 (for Tolstoy and the Imperfections of Fiction)
  • Postdoctoral Fellowship, ACLS/SSRC, 1996-7 (for Poverty of the Imagination)
  • U.C. Berkeley Distinguished Graduate Student Instructor Award
  • Phi Beta Kappa

Selected Publications:

  • "Khadzhi-Murat's Silence." Slavic Review 64:1 (2005): 1-23.
  • Poverty of the Imagination: 19th-Century Russian Literature About the Poor. Evanston, Northwestern University Press: 2001.
  • Second-Year Russian: A Textbook (1999, course packet used at UVa, 534 p.).
  • "Don Juan and Don Alejandro: The Seductions of Art in Pushkin's Stone Guest." Comparative Literature 51:1 (1999): 3-23.
  • "Innocents at Home: 'Poor Liza' as a Response to The Letters of a Russian Traveler." Russian Literature 44:2 (1998): 159-83.
  • "Allowable Passions in Anna Karenina." Tolstoy Studies Journal 8 (1998) (Special Issue: Anna Karenina): 5-32.
  • "Stricken by Infection: Art and Adultery in Anna Karenina and Kreutzer Sonata." Slavic Review 56:1 (1997): 15-36.
  • "A Requiem for Aristocratic Art: Pushkin's 'Egyptian Nights.'" Russian Review (1996): 661-80.