Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Although she talks about alienation from society and self caused by apartheid, Gordimer scorns an empty, abstract ideal of relevance. "Artists shouldn't talk about apartheid--they have to go deeper," she snorts. The writer can make others feel, and the emotional depth necessary to convey such experience comes from a writer's internal commitment, she says. "Commitment takes over from within--it's the point at which the inner and outer world fuse." Commitment is the process of making moral decisions on grounds frustratingly ambiguous and clouded...
...with, yet less enamored of the language than of the signifying narration, and yet less enamored of the narration than of its formal arrangement, one need not necessarily imagine that artist therefore forsaking the world for language, language for the processes of narration, and those processes for the abstract possibilities of form. Might he/she not as readily, at least as possibly, be imagined as thereby (if only thereby) enabled to love the narrative through the form, the language through the narrative, even the world through the language...
...ordeal. Indeed, one comes to admire the fortitude of Actress Nell in playing a scene that must have been almost as terrible to film as an actual rape would be to endure. Yet the sequence has value, revealing through the action of the rapists rather than through abstract discussion the psychology of this sort of criminal, which centers on the need to victimize and abase. It also reveals, as no other film ever has, the horror visited upon the woman. No one who witnesses this scene will ever be able to dismiss the subject casually...
...asked for my most thrilling moment in public service. I have participated in many spectacular events. But the moment that moved me most deeply has to be that cool, autumn, Sunday afternoon while the shadows were falling over the serene French landscape and that large quiet room, hung with abstract paintings, was illuminated only at the green
Perhaps most controversially, Gofman advocates "bringing home the Nuremberg Principles." Death spread by nuclear power strikes him as murder of a civilian population, fitting the Nuremberg definition of crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg statement that "Crimes against international law are committed by men, not abstract entities" would therefore open legions of scientists, bureaucrats and others to prosecution. The more practical converse of his view is that citizens who withhold taxes, trespass on reactor sites or otherwise resist nuclear power are entitled to present juries with the reasons for their civil disobedience--a line of defense judges disallow...