Word: alien
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...blue period, with his wistful clowns and phthisic women. Kitaj's three Bathers, with their iridescent blooms of pastel and general air of tentative anxiety, pay homage to the blue period. But they stare from the paper with the look of rough creatures trapped in an alien element, refugees from Goya and Velásquez as well as from the 20th century. This ability to suggest cultural continuity in the midst of a general malaise may be the final rea son why Kitaj's art haunts a corner of one's mind that no other living painter...
...order of Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In their version, the Old Testament's creator-God becomes the evil Demiurge, who created the physical world to imprison man and estrange him from the true God--who is not part of Creation at all, but an alien being to whom men with true knowledge, or gnosis, seek to return. The doctrines make provocative theology and a fascinating attack on the Gospels, but Bloom can't find enough concrete material there to shape into a good fantasy novel. Instead of focusing on a few key symbols and investing them with...
...earlier works, this novel parodies those institutions claiming to have achieved static perfection or ultimate knowledge. Like Lem's earlier protagonists, usually human scientists studying alien civilizations, John is struggling to discover truths inherently too complex or mysterious to be understood. The utter failure of man's scientific explorations in past novels manifests the author's conviction that man cannot apprehend the universe in a meaningful, objective...
...need for one as well? It is not at all clear, for the novel's realism is so intense that the conclusion is entirely unconvincing. We should suspect the patness of his solution but be content in our ignorance by acknowledging Lem's masterful ability to make the alien seem so familiar and the ordinary so frighteningly unknown...
...angry, provocative new book called Orientalism (Pantheon; $15), Edward Said, 43, Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, argues that the West has tended to define Islam in terms of the alien categories imposed on it by Orientalist scholars. Professor Said is a member of the Palestine National Council, a broadly based, informal parliament of the Palestine Liberation Organization. He summarized the thesis of Orientalism in this article for TIME...