Word: existentialist
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Independent Whim. Ulm's particular specialty has been the theater of the absurd, and absurdity-:the existentialist-born notion that only the moment matters and the moment is meaningless -reaches great heights in Ulm, so great in fact that writers like Beckett, Jean Genet (The Blacks) and Eugene lonesco (The Bald Soprano) are actually regarded as "old fuddy-duddies" by some residents. Beckett's new Play, in their view, has a plot and is therefore blighted...
...unbelievable elements as its heaven-above, hell-below framework. But demythologizing, Robinson points out, threatened to end up with "the conclusion that the Jesus of the kerygma could well be only a myth." Deprived of its link with the historical Jesus, Christianity might end up as some kind of existentialist philosophy, of which Christ was little more than a mythological symbol...
...Bultmannite Biblical critics, such as William Albright of Johns Hopkins, contend that the Marburgers are too skeptical in rejecting so much of the New Testament as unhistorical. Other theologians complain that in place of the humanist Jesus produced by the old quest, the new quest is shaping an existentialist one. Karl Earth grandly dismissed the quest as an irrelevant project...
...Darkling Plain. Arnold began, almost a century before Sartre, as something very like a modern existentialist. "Let us be true to one another.'' he wrote in Dover Beach, for the world Hath really neither joy, nor love nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain ; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night...
...times James seems so close to the existentialists that it may be misleading to stress the differences. Yet he never extols the virtues of existential dread. For the sensitive human being, he knew, anxiety of this sort is unavoidable. But it is something to recover from, not a state in which to remain--except for the purpose of writing existentialist manifestos. In short, the plight of man is his sense of existence; his salvation, the concomitant power to mediate and refine. The sense of individual existence is not the "absolute truth" for James. Indeed, the realm that confers meaning upon...