Word: existentialist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...line in the song admitted: "Actually, I don't believe any of it"). Then came Edith Piaf, so thin that she was barely visible through the nightclub smoke, with an occasional sentimental number (La Vie en Rose), but in reality a siren of disillusion, a kind of existentialist among chanteuses. But Patachou is almost a rural reactionary, who goes back to a sturdy, bucolic France that persists beneath the phony Parisian sparkle...
...English dubbed in, is a satire on the type of superspectacle exemplified by Hollywood's Quo Vadis. If Quo Vadis was one of the costliest ($6,500,000) movies ever made, O.K. Nero is certainly one of the silliest. It has knockdown clowning, pratfalls, songs, dances, and an existentialist ballet. Constantly rowdy, it is only intermittently funny...
Were Sophocles to croon this chorus (from Antigone*) below the boudoir of Existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, she would very likely fling wide her French window and bomb him with The Second Sex (weight: 2¾ Ibs.). For Sophocles' measures stand for just about everything that Author de Beauvoir considers most hateful in human life. As she sees it, the male's conquest of the earth, the sea etc. is just an analogue of his smug conquest of the little woman...
...Invention of Woman. As Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre's major disciple and friend, Author de Beauvoir deplores the fact that much of mankind draws spiritual nourishment from myth, religion, legend and unthinking optimism. Man, argues the existentialist, must be more than a mere passive "being." He must be an "existent," i.e., one who boldly accepts the mortality of body & soul but nonetheless resolves to pit his courage (his only weapon) against the cruel reality of life & death...
Niebuhr believes the existentialist mode of thinking has been present in Christian writings since Augustine first considered his relationship to God. Luther and Pascal, both questioners of their own being and its place in the universe, sought the same truths for which modern existentialists are striving...