Word: existentialist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Oates uses madness as a symbol for a peculiar kind of corruption in the soul. Her characters are not hateful because of anything that they do; they are not even guilty of the usual existentialist sins of cowardice and self-deception. On the contrary, they bravely confront problems which most of us prefer not to think about. Their only fault is the morbid quality of their fascination with these problems. Their ugliness is not a failure of character, but a rottenness of essence that can only be observed by an omniscient narrator...
...course Beckett the absurdist, the existentialist does come through in his style. Many lines in "Echo's Bones" and "Malacoda" remind us of that airy, disjointed dialogue in Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Beckett's poems are filled with much of the same choppy, incomplete, grammarless phrases that characterize his prose and dialogues. Yet there is still that cryptic element...
...asks in one particularly moving column, and opts for the existentialist answer that the universe is absurd, that her illness is simply random luck. In that way, she is able not only to shed self-pity but to turn the question around: "Why not me?" From there, she explains, it is "only a matter of time to it is me-and what am I going...
...probably the liveliest intellectual hubbub to hit Paris since the early 1950s, when Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre startled other leftist intellectuals by defending Stalin's ironfisted regime, in spite of its excesses. This time the furor revolves around a group of young intellectuals, most of them lapsed Marxists, who are now attacking Marxism as an evil, obsolete ideology that leads inevitably to totalitarianism. The "New Philosophers," as they are known, have become overnight celebrities-featured on magazine covers and on TV talk shows. The New Philosophers have no wide popular following and are unlikely to have much impact...
...conquistadors' story is also presented without judgment. Herzog, the enfant terrible of the German film industry, is widely-known for his existentialist treatment of his subjects, and Aguirre is no different. Herzog's view of the Spaniards' abuse of the Indians they found in Latin America is offered through juxtaposition of images--four chained Indians struggle under the burden of a gaily-decorated sedan chair while its occupant looks on impassively; the monk impassively kills two Indians who fail to understand his efforts to proseletize. But the filmmaker's views are rarely more articulated than this, as if he accepts...