Word: authored
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...violate the western myth and "when the myth becomes legend I believe in printing the legend." The quote is a bastardization of a line delivered to Stewart in John ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and in its original context is a very bitter statement of an author (Ford) attempting to reevaluate his entire system of values. Stewart's recent use of the quote is not only far more common, it derives from a very dangerous assumption: that there is something which can be called the western myth, complete with characters conflicts, and values...
...trying to build a strong society, a revolutionary society that they hope will ultimately conquer the world. But they don't allow this kind of sexuality. They came to the conclusion that this is a destructive force. I don't think the function of the playwright, the author, the artist, is to reflect what's going on, any more than I should reflect what's going on. I think their function ought to be to lead, to direct...
...borders between science and science-fiction grow steadily less precise. Biophysics and medical engineering, as Alan Harrington notes, have begun to grope for the secrets of extending life. Organ transplants and artificial parts are already promising realities. The author also cites such wildly remote possibilities as quick-freezing incurables until cures can be found, administering rejuvenating shots of DNA and even duplicating an entire human body from genetically coded snippets. To exclamations that immortality achieved by such means is an impossible dream or a presumptuous nightmare, Harrington asserts that man is capable of anything...
...Permanent Revolution against Imaginary Gods." The Devil, it follows, far from being the embodiment of evil, is man's healthiest prototypical projection of his own radical intention to challenge the gods-in fact, to become God. All humbling conceptions of man's relationship to the unknown, the author insists, are bad. Even the Hindu's striving for the oblivion of nirvana, he asserts, is a subtle passive-resistance ploy to achieve godhood...
...mercantile society's well-known and often belabored shortcomings. Tournier intended some satirical comment on civilization's defects, of course, or why else so pointedly rewrite a tract in which the Western world is praised? What gradually dawns on the surprised reader is that the author has accomplished much more. As a 20th century author, Tournier is concerned with Defoe's implicit but largely unexplored theme, the development of a mind in isolation. With a winning blend of Parisian wit and sensuousness, he concentrates not on Crusoe's conclusions but on the subjective process of reaching...