Word: guilt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Being through confrontation with the vicissitudes of life. Like Kierkegaard, Jaspers embraced the Judeo-Christian belief that "however minute a quantity the individual may be among the factors that make history, he is a factor." Such inwardly directed views led him in 1947 to write The Question of German Guilt, which outraged many of his countrymen for its theme of collective culpability for World War II, and he left Germany in 1949 to teach at Basel University. Most of his works were agonizingly abstruse and seemingly preoccupied with reconciliation to failure and death as prescriptions for personal salvation...
...Alexander Portnoy Show!" He's the standup comedian out to tell the definitive Jewish joke. He is also the talented son, risen to the post of Assistant Commissioner for the City of New York Commission on Human Opportunity. His parents--"the two outstanding producers and packagers of guilt in our time"--are the expected, overprotective Jewish mother and her long-suffering, constipated husband (whose constipation seems to rival Luther's in cosmic significance.) Togther they praise and badger Portnoy until he finds himself in a paradoxical position: his family considers him among "princes . . . and saviours and sheer perfection...
Portnoy's Complaint, a novel in the form of a psychoanalytic monologue carried on by a guilt-ridden bachelor, is too funny not to be taken seriously. It is a Jewish Psychological Sex Novel of the Absurd. It is a work of farce that exaggerates and then destroys its content, leaving a gaping emptiness...
...Down Comic. Although sex, psychoanalysis and Jewishness form the content of the novel, they are not its subject. The book is about absurdity-the absurdity of a man who knows all about the ethnic, sociological and Freudian hang-ups, yet is still racked by guilt because his ethical impulses conflict with the surge of his animal desires. In Alexander Portnoy's own words, he is "torn by desires that are repugnant to my conscience, and a conscience repugnant to my desires...
...considerably more informative on the subject than their official handbook. He describes how he used his sister's unlaundered brassiere, his windbreaker on a bus, and even his baseball glove while sitting in the balcony of a burlesque house. But the more he discharged, the greater became his guilt. It was a vicious cycle that led him into his psychological ghetto of lust and shame...