Word: existentialist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...believe in anything any more," complains one young writer. With 20% of the urban young in China less than fully employed, and perhaps all of them sharing the disenchantment that is a legacy of the Cultural Revolution, it is small wonder that college students are said to embrace Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre's views of alienation. Indeed, before the crackdown, "alienation" had become a rallying cry for those who entertained unauthorized views. According to the official press, 600 articles on alienation have darkened Chinese journals since 1978. The most celebrated essay appeared last March in People's Daily...
...this time of year, however, many students are more interested in grabbing a quick beer before finals than arguing about campus politics. Last weekend, at a corner table in Jonathan Edwards dining hall, Suzanne Ingram checked over a food list for the "existentialist" party she was planning in honor of the conclusion of spring classes. At the next table over, a representative of the residential college was attempting to sell tickets to the Moth Ball, a recently established J.E. rite in which students dance away their academic blues. Three blocks away, Andee Hochman, editor of the Yale Daily News, walked...
...practice, is that mystery becomes unnecessary. Whenever one character wonders what another is thinking or feeling, telepathy comes instantly to the rescue. Different people are simply parcels of the same brain, one that usually resembles Norman Mailer's. Menenhetet I often sounds like the world's oldest existentialist: "Look for the risk. We must obey it every time. There is no credit to be drawn from the virtue of one's past." This figure has given much thought during his lives to the mysterious, possibly magic properties of human excrement, a topic that Mailer has pondered...
Partly his staying power comes from an almost religious dedication to craft. Christian symbols and ethics hover around much of his work; it was no accident that in Atlantic Brief Lives, a biographical compendium, he chose to write about Søren Kierkegaard. The existentialist, Updike noted, works "with flirtatious ambiguities, elaborate deceits and impersonations, fascinating oscillations of emphasis, all sorts of erotic 'display...
...murder's infamy usually derives from the renown of the victim or the ghastliness of the crime. But when Richard Adan, 22, a budding playwright and a waiter, was stabbed last summer by a restaurant patron, the fascination focused on the killer: Jack Henry Abbott, Marxist, existentialist, prison murderer, author (In the Belly of the Beast) and, beginning a few weeks before Adan's killing, literary celebrity (see ESSAY). On his 38th birthday last week in Manhattan, Abbott was found guilty of manslaughter. Because he admitted that he had killed Adan, the verdict was considered a victory...