Word: humanism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...life of Fred Shibley has much to teach us. A curious combination of human will, seemingly "chance" encounters, and social forces inexplicably opposed to a man's will. At a thousand points his life might have been an entirely different story. And yet somehow it was all inevitable. Mr. Shibley's life is just like our own, only much more exciting...
Vladimir Nabakov, like Joseph Conrad, is a foreigner who has become one of the most important stylists in English; but, unlike Barth, he deals with human beings, not metaphysics. The charm, for instance, of the novel Pnin (included in its entirety in Nabokov's Congeires) comes not so much from the telling of the story as from the character of Pnin, a hapless professor of Russian in a small American college. There may be no real separation between style and content, but Nabokov uses his style to create a believable man, charming and pathetic. Having just fallen down a flight...
Barth's main fault in this book is that he is not concerned with human beings--that is, the human beings he creates--but rather with his own intrusive role as author. Mabye this is not wrong, but there can be no interest in the substance of the stories, because there is no substance, only style. For my money, that is not enough, and I find it annoying. It is easy, dear reader, to play games with the reader, usually addressed "dear reader" (or by Barth "dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard"), and extend these games until neither the dear reader...
...refuses to accept the fact that the modern world is a different place than it was in 1903, Giraudoux has more than frivolity in mind. Below the surface of his comedy is the serious warning that the snowballing forces of materialism, fascism and war must be checked if the human race is to survive. When Herman's turn comes to dig into this serious core, he falls apart. His answer to the dramatic problem is a song called "Garbage," and it's not much better than the title suggests: a supposedly bitter number about the decline in beauty of refuse...
...Stanley Kubrick's epic of human advancement, externally motivated. The special effects must be seen, and can best be seen from the first five rows. At the CINERAMA, Washington Street near Essex...