Word: existentialist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that the formal doctrine--over the long run--contained a theory of truth as rigorous as that of any positivist. But, in addition to the demand for rigor, it stresses man's freedom and ultimate moral responsibility. If it were not for his optimism, one might call James an existentialist. And the optimistic style did not come easily. With it James sought to encourage, to cure and rejuvenate--none other so much as himself...
...heaven-above-hell-below framework of Scripture as religious myths; he argues that the essential Gospel message must be "demythologized" by liberating it from antiquated supernatural language. Rejecting the Biblical image of a transcendent God in the sky, Robinson suggests that Christians think of God the way Existentialist Theologian Paul Tillich does: as the "ground of all being...
...Knowledge of Death. Before Rome, Greene used to paint frozen tableaux that mirrored modern existentialist ideas. He trapped his figures-as in Sartre's No Exit-in shallow doorless and windowless spaces, amputated their legs, and left them relying on crutches. The Burial (see color) shows a legless living cadaver sprawled in a coffin, stifling back a scream with his hand-a scream that comes from "the pain of knowledge of that death in life which we begin experiencing early," Greene explains. Behind the coffin lid, a mourner gestures upward as if in hope. But his candle remains unlit...
...true that Freud, Joyce and general confusion in the mind have made it impossible to write novels in the manner of Anthony Trollope. Sybille Bedford does just that. She is not an existentialist desperado; she does not go into psychological swivets; she has no new material for Dr. Kinsey. She just tells a plain tale with an old-fashioned Trollopean sense of the importance of what people wear, the houses they occupy, the jobs and property they get and lose, and the inherent drama of the tables of consanguinity. To this concern she adds a truly female tongue...
Gulliver Unravels. At this point it may be suspected that Burgess is merely putting on a Grand Guignol and that he shares Alex's taste for the existentialist's "gratuitous act" or pointless crime. He is not. Alex's later story is "like tragic" and expounds a bitter moral theorem. He is jailed and selected by the state authorities for Reclamation Treatment. Under drugs and with his eyelids clipped open, he is forced to watch an endless succession of films showing Japanese and Nazi tortures while Beethoven supplies the sound track. Then, conditioned like Pavlov...