DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

Research interests:

Saul Morson's work ranges over a variety of areas: literary theory (especially narrative); the history of ideas, both Russian and European; a variety of literary genres (especially satire, utopia, and the novel); and his favorite writers — Chekhov, Gogol, and, above all, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. He is especially interested in the relation of literature to philosophy.

Work currently in progress:

Professor Morson typically works on a number of projects at once.  He is working on a study of the Brothers Karamazov.

Selected publications:

• Prosaics and other provocations; Empathy, open time, and the novel
• The Long and the short of it: From aphorism to novel (top 5 finalist for the Christian Gauss award of Phi Beta Kappa)
• Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time
• Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (co-authored with Caryl Emerson)
• Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in "War and Peace"

Honors:

Professor Morson has won "best book of the year" awards from the American Comparative Literature Association and the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages; he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and he is the only Northwestern professor to have held simultaneously two endowed chairs, one for research and one for teaching.

Courses taught in the last 3 years:

• Undergraduate courses on the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
• Graduate courses devoted to single novels--Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, and The Idiot--and on Mikhail Bakhtin and on various topics in Russian intellectual history.