Word: demotte
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...recent years, writes Critic Benjamin DeMott, "the most intense accounts of domestic life and problems, as well as the few unembarrassedly passionate love poems, have been the work of writers who are not heterosexual . . . Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet and Auden. They have a steady consciousness of a dark side of love that is neither homo-nor heterosexual but simply human." New York Times Drama Critic Clive Barnes muses, "Creativity might be a sort of psychic disturbance itself, mightn't it? Artists are not particularly happy people anyway...
...DeMott, this emotional response constitutes a severe case of overkill: "Fits of fury that plucked out eyes from severed heads." It is as if, speculates DeMott, "fury seemed a possible substitute for moral clarity and worth...
...writers who prefer rationality to revolution are by no means traditionally conservative. In the Sunday New York Times Magazine last month, Benjamin DeMott, chairman of the English department at Amherst, explored the casually violent language of the revolutionary-minded. Among his specimens...
...through his company, paralyzed in one room, of the human condition. He prevents the movie from disintegrating into the mysterious-accident type by injecting symbols--the sheep, for example. We always know that the absurd situation and the not-quite-tragic characters are part of Bunuel's allegory. JOEL DEMOTT...
Adding to the ferment, two pieces sharply disagree. Stanley Kauffmann explains how he got jobbed by the New York Times for trying to do "serious drama criticism" during his brief tour there last year. By contrast, Benjamin DeMott attacks Kauffmann's most discussed criticism: the two articles he did for the Sunday Times accusing homosexual playwrights of always trying to"invent a two-sex version of the one-sex experience." As DeMott sees it, the homosexuals contribute a valid theatrical experience -"a steady consciousness of a dark side of love...