Word: absurdum
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...might be thought that this heightened consciousness of man's fate would spur some new heroic attitude, and in a minimal way it has. For "Credo quia absurdum [I believe because it is absurd]" these playwrights substitute: I will endure, knowing it is absurd. This is a far cry from the vaulting heroes of past tragedy. The tragic hero must bear full responsibility for his acts, and that is what makes him a thing of the past. Modern intellectual man sees himself as the plaything of powers beyond his reach and shrugs along with Hamlet: "The time...
...Barbara Harris plays it all in reverse. She not only has a bosom, she saucily displays it. As a constant nympho in Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, she nearly fell out of her blouse giggling, wiggling and winding around a virginal young man in a nocturnal round of seductio ad absurdum...
...dead theologians are the reductio ad absurdum of American Protestant theology. When they have not fallen into the perennial heresy of gnostic mysticism, like Altizer, they are conscious or unconscious followers of Durkheim, in that the real object of their worship is 20th century culture, particularly 20th century intellectual culture. They put themselves in the ridiculous position of saying to God, "Either come up to us 20th century intellectuals or get out." It would be a mistake to take them too seriously...
...Nazi regime, in fact, was the ad absurdum of this history. The seven years of its success (1933-), however, are not merely a tribute to the logic of history, or--as has been more widely supposed--to the power-mania of Adolf Hitler...