COM LIT 4DW Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Unconscious Mind, Utopia

• School: UCLA
• Department: Comparative Literature
• Course: COM LIT 4DW
• Professor: Sacilotto

Document Summary

Someone who reacts to something that has happened. Usually a person who opposed a movement of change. Organize in reaction to something that has occurred. The industrial revolution is big in the 19th century. Because he can already see the e ects of modernity before him. Modernity was considered to be the end of history. Counter: what if modernity is actually setting us back. Dostoevsky says that a sense of social integrity is what was lost. There has to be a minimum set of standard to keep the community going and capitalism threatens this. His hypothesis: dostoevsky thinks modernity is a crisis of thinking and rationality. Dostoevsky doesn"t accept that by thinking more we get better. The underground man does a whole bunch of thinking but he can"t do anything he is socially alienated. Thinking can be the thing that prevents us from acting. The underground man per dostoevsky is a gure to express what is wrong with modernity.