Word: alling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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According to Grass, "literature has an explosive quality at its root, though the explosions literature releases have a delayed-action effect...How long did it take the European Enlightenment from Montaigne to Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Lessing and Lichtenberg to introduce a flicker of reason into the dark corners of scholasticism...
To begin with, it's a gross misconception to claim that the Enlightenment was the work of writers. Writers might have advertised and propagated it, but the Enlightenment, like every single major transformation in history, was the work of scientists. It was the work of Descartes and Galileo and Newton...
Yet what I find most questionable in Grass's interpretation of history is the very old and very false notion that our current problems are the legacy of the Enlightenment, that they are the fault of "cold reason," and that somehow the program of the Enlightenment has proven a failure...
The report on Leonard-Tenney, for example, includes no quotes from people other than Leonard and Tenney. Likewise for Driskell-Burton, where the candidates are the only people quoted--promising, among other things, to keep all their promises.
In all, it is not so much the style of the articles that I am complaining about, but the fact that, clearly, they were not written with equal effort or intent. I can only feel sorry for the Leonard and Driskell camps, whose profiles are exercises in vapidity that can...