The Fate of Dostoevskij's Underground Man: The Case for an Open Ending

Rosenshield, Gary

doi:10.2307/307831

Cited by 3 publications

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“…The Underground Man who composes the Notes is fifteen or sixteen years the senior of the younger one he describes in Part Two of the book. That older man, as Rosenshield (1984) shows, takes full responsibility for his earlier actions, experiencing guilt for them but also becoming more genuinely compassionate as he reflects on his relations with Liza.…”

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confidence: 99%

Happiness, Despair and Education

Roberts

2012

Stud Philos Educ

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In today's world we appear to place a premium on happiness. Happiness is often portrayed, directly or indirectly, as one of the key aims of education. To suggest that education is concerned with promoting unhappiness or even despair would, in many contexts, seem outlandish. This paper challenges these widely held views. Focusing on the work of the great Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, I argue that despair, the origins of which lie in our reflective consciousness, is a defining feature of human life. Education, I suggest, should not be seen as a flight from despair but as a process of deepening our understanding of suffering and its potentially pivotal role in our humanisation. In developing these ideas, I draw on Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death and Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, among other sources.

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confidence: 99%

Happiness, Despair and Education

Roberts

2012

Stud Philos Educ

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“…Rosenshield, 1984). The recursive dynamic of underground consciousness, even while it exposes a depraved conscience, also reflects a moral creativity -precisely grounded in the authoring function of the underground man.…”

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Unorthodox confession, orthodox conscience: aesthetic authority in the underground

Allen

2007

Stud East Eur Thought

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Dostoevskij's underground parody of confession paradoxically recovers an Orthodox morality by constructing an unorthodox model of authority and authorship. The authenticity and authority of underground discourse are both contingent on self-conscious parody, which also mediates Orthodox community or sobornost'. This essay critically reconsiders ethical, aesthetic and cultural dimensions of the self-conscious interpolation of literary and religious discourses in Dostoevskij's Notes from Underground. Arguing with and against Bakhtinian readings, it re-examines the underground narrator's secularized, Romanticized sensibilities, cynical critique of humanism, sacrilegious modes of laughter, usurpation of authority, internalization of dialogue, literary stylization and parody, aesthetic and moral self-critique, and, finally, insistence on ''a new word.''

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The last utopia: Entropy and revolution in the poetics of Evgeny Zamjatin

Sicher¹

1991

History of European Ideas

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The Fate of Dostoevskij's Underground Man: The Case for an Open Ending

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Happiness, Despair and Education

Happiness, Despair and Education

Unorthodox confession, orthodox conscience: aesthetic authority in the underground

The last utopia: Entropy and revolution in the poetics of Evgeny Zamjatin

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