Word: adorno
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...relatively small group who become therapy junkies." Others insist that today's narcissism is far broader, a cultural phenomenon growing out of two seemingly competing features of the 1960s and 1970s, rising personal affluence and deepening individual power lessness. The late Marxist sociologist Theodor Adorno took what is probably the darkest view. Capitalism, he maintained, causes such alienation that "narcissistic merger" of the disaffected with charismatic fascist leaders is becoming more likely. Other critics argue that Americans are turning inward because of a sense that individuals cannot have important social or political impact. Says former Yippee Leader Jerry Rubin...
BERNSTEIN'S CASE for Stravinsky is eloquent and convincing. He quotes Theodor Adorno, a dogmatic advocate of Schoenberg who accused Stravinsky of hiding behind an insincere mask of eclecticism. Bernstein defends the neoclassical mask as a reaction to the extreme subjectivity of overblown Romanticism and draws interesting parallels to the poetry of T.S. Eliot. But here, too, his polemic dislike of Schoenberg leads him to inaccuracy and self-contradiction. Having accused the serialists of mechanically turning out music that is "form without content," he now condemns them for discarding the order imposed by diatonicism. Stravinsky's "great save," neoclassicism...
...Bernstein's treatment of Schoenberg suffers from the same dogmatism he criticizes in Adorno. His failure is a failure to listen to the music on its own terms. He imposes his tonal expectations on works that have a different internal logic. He points triumphantly to the Bach chorale quoted at the end of Berg's Violin Concerto, without recognizing it as a historical allusion like those he found in Stravinsky and Eliot. Berg used tonal devices frequently for certain kinds of effects, but rarely as a basic principle of his music...
...world. To tilt against its fundamental principles may have been courage, but it was the courage which has been immortalized by the dangerous pen of Cervantes." But for "cyclical" Lipset there is never "a different world." It is ever and always the same, a world of domination. For as Adorno observed of Spengler, the principle of relentlessly self-per-petuating domination is hypostasized as something eternal and inexorable. James Shotwell in his penetrating critique of Spengler is worth pondering in this juncture. In his own words: "Winter followed Autumn in the past because life was repetitive and passed within limited...
Rafael Sabatini's 34th adventure story, The Sword of Islam (Houghton Mifflin, $2.50), compares favorably with his best work (Scaramouche, Captain Blood). As dramatic as Italian opera without music, it is as ornately composed as Italian pastry. Laid in the 16th Century, it concerns one Prospero Adorno, wide-browed, slim-hipped soldier-poet, who first appears as commander of a naval squadron blockading Genoa. He changes sides several times, several times buys and talks his way out of captivity, is dishonored, vindicated, at last makes mincemeat of the Moslems, wins beautiful Gianna. Who fights whom is immaterial-the main...