Word: detachment
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...host is auditory. "What the hell are you doing here?" asks a disembodied voice somewhere over my head. This is something of a stumper, and having no response ready, I introduce myself to the stairway. For a moment the steps sit undisturbed but soon a small dark blob detaches itself from the effulgence above and comes waddling down the stairs towards me. The blob quickly congeals into a very interesting looking human being. He is a fairly small man, no more than a few inches over 5 feet tall, with an enormous belly which billows out in front...
...machetes attacking a Spanish cavalry unit, or some remarkable complacency or quite ordinary cowardice, he always deflates heroic claims that men control their destinies. Battles are planned with elaborate strategy and won by blind chance. So many of these images are both horrible and accidentally funny that they finally detach the reader from any feeling but irony...
Everyone knows war changes culture; but it is hard to say how, since war is culture. From the mid-'30s, war has been so continuous and "normal" a state of society that we find it awkward, even impossible, to detach it from our unconscious assumptions about literature and its workings. Hence the value of this extraordinary and moving book by Paul Fussell, a Rutgers University professor. There is, he argues, a peculiarly modern consciousness of war. It began in the trenches of France in 1914, and it has continued to affect writing ever since. Indeed, European culture-especially...
...Kennedy's Children, each of five characters sits in a bar, gets drunk, and relives a personal and national tragedy. At the rate of ten platitudes per minute, they try to "unfuck themselves from the sixties." They fail and the play fails; the playwright, like his characters, cannot detach himself from the decade he is trying to analyze...
Lichtenstein's prints are like medieval Christian didactic panels. They communicate instantly. Their iconography is easily recognizable, their meaning concentrated and abstracted. It is this element of caricature--caricature achieved by reducing something to its most essential and distinctive elements--that Lichtenstein is trying to isolate, detach and analyse...