Reading Comprehension

PT134 · S4 · P4 · Q24 Dostoyevsky’s Position on Literature

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During Dostoyevsky’s time there were two significant and opposing directions in Russian literary criticism.

Topic

Dostoyevsky / role of art

Framework

Present Debate

Main Point

Dostoyevsky rejected thinking of art as high-minded transcendence or as a vehicle for explicitly combating injustice, favoring instead a notion of art as something coming from the artist's reality (including the artist's fantasies) and primarily focused on delivering artistic excellence, rather than on serving some useful societal message.

Summary

The first sentence alerts us that there are two significant and opposing directions in Russian literary criticism. Whenever we get two or more points of view that are not the author's, we start to think in Present Debate form, assuming that the big ideas to track in the passage are the various answers to some central question.

We can tell from the second sentence that the central question these two different school of thought are pondering is something like,

Position 1 - art stands high about the present and the every day (this position means very little to me when I first read about it. I end up understanding it more by defining it as the opposite of what we learn Position 2 is all about). Basically they think that art should be about transcendent realms of beauty / profound timeless stuff, not the muck and prosaic minutiae of everyday life.

Position 2 (radical critics) - art should depict reality as it is, in concrete reality, and expose suffering and injustice, so that it can be useful to the world.

Position 3 (Dostoyevsky) - art should pull from reality, but reality can include what we experience in real life within the sphere of the fantastic. And artists should worry most about communicating their vision well, not about how useful their vision is (who knows what art will prove to be useful).

24.

Which one of the following most accurately describes the organization of the material presented in the passage?

Three positions are presented and
Too Strong: elaborated in detail
This answer would not seem tempting if we were looking for a last-ingredient match, but it still seems workable. We could say that the last paragraph or two is where Dostoyevsky's position was elaborated in detail. So we'd probably need to consider how well the rest of this answer matches to the rest of the passage. The passage opens by saying "there were two significant and opposing directions in Russian literary criticism", so we get two positions there and one more from Dostoyevsky. The problem, though, is that the first position "that art stood high above the present and the everyday" is not elaborated in detail. In fact, what I just typed is all we know about this first position. So we'd get rid of this because it's inaccurate to say that the 1st position was elaborated in detail. Moreover, it seems to be a poor description of the passage to make it seem, as this answer does, like all three positions are created equal. We should be expecting something more like "here's the radical position, and then here's Dostoyevsky's three-paragraph takedown of that position".
8% picked this
Three positions are presented and
Weak Match
This answer is worth keeping at first. The third position is Dostoyevsky's, and it's definitely differentiated from the other two. But it's only differentiated from the 2nd position in detail. The first paragraph has a cursory / brief mention of how Dostoyevsky's position differs from the 1st position. The 1st position says that "art stood high above the present and the everyday" whereas Dostoyevsky thinks that "(everyday) reality is literature's crucial source". If we found nothing better, we could consider this answer, but like (A) this answer isn't appreciating how the 1st position is barely mentioned, and the bulk of the passage is about Dostoyevsky responding to the 2nd position, the one from the radical critics.
14% picked this
Correct
Three positions are presented and
Why this is right
As we've covered in the first two answer choices, there are certainly three positions presented (the two opposing directions in Russian literary criticism and Dostoyevsky's position). Paragraphs 2, 3, and 4 are all about differentiating Dostoyevsky's position from the 2nd of the two critical positions, the radical view. There is barely any text differentiating Dostoyevsky's position from the first position, that art stood high above the present and the everyday. There is one sentence differentiating him ("he was a realist who thought reality was literature's crucial source"), but that doesn't count as differentiating him in detail.
Skill tested: Organization · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.
75% picked this
Three positions are presented and
Bad Last Ingredient
The passage ends by describing Dostoyevsky's objections to the radical critics' view, but the author never offers any of her own opinion or evaluation of the relative merits of the three positions. Thus we can't say that she showed Dostoyevsky's position to be superior to the first two.
3% picked this
Three positions are presented and
Bad Last Ingredient
The passage ends by describing Dostoyevsky's objections to the radical critics' view, but the author never offers any of her own opinion or evaluation of the relative merits of the three positions. Thus we can't say that she showed Dostoyevsky's position to be inferior to the second view.
0% picked this

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