F5C The Tell-Tale Mind: Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov and Poe's Confessional Murderers
Literature & Writing | Registration opens 9/2/2026 12:00 AM
Description: This course pairs Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart" and “The Black Cat.” Through these works, we will examine how both authors use intensely subjective narration to draw readers into the minds of killers whose accounts are both revealing and unreliable. Raskolnikov’s theories, fevers, evasions, and confessions will be read beside Poe’s monomaniacal and delusory first-person narrators. Together, these works reveal murder not as an act of dark artistry, but as a collapse of reason, conscience, and self-control—driven by vanity, wounded pride, and the ego’s need to justify itself. The text that will be used is: Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Classics, 1993. ISBN: 978-0-679-73450-5. Part One will be discussed in the first class on September 11.
NOTE: This class will end at 4:45 p.m.
- Image courtesy of Shutterstock
Daniel Lanzetta
Presenter
Daniel Lanzetta, MA, (LLI) has been teaching literature most of his life at Mt. Vernon High School, The College of New Rochelle, Thornton School, and Western Connecticut State University. He hopes to continue teaching it in the afterlife, but that remains to be seen.