Word: inhuman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...really scary, chilling thing about this voice is its profound bitterness--a sort of challenge to all comers that commands sympathy at the same time that it defies it, that attracts as it repels, that bores directly at some common core of human experience with a drill of inhuman strength...
FICTION, of late, has occasionally suffered from a peculiar kind of affliction. Many modern novelists, given the temper of the times, have viewed the world as a grim, inhuman place, and that view has paralyzed them as much as it has inspired them. Practitioners of the Literature of Impotence and Exhaustion, for example, have tended to become impotent and exhausted. Samuel Beckett, unable even to bewail further the impossibility of expression, has written nothing of significance for twenty years now, except for a few anguished fragments (his publishers have taken to offering new tran-slations of old, discarded texts). John...
...terror: The Painted Bird and Steps were catalogues of lurid atrocities, accounts of sadism, bestiality, and so forth, every one more horrible than the last. Kosinski's precise, emotionless prose didn't just render those atrocities in all their harsh reality; it became a part of the horror, inhuman beyond mere colorlessness. Kosinski's bestial imagination hasn't failed him in his new novel: the episodes of rape and dismemberment are as brutal and varied as ever. But there is something missing, some sense of the bizarre and the demonic that inspired his early novels and, where they were inhumanly...
...science seemed especially dismal to Karl Marx, who damned capitalism as an inhuman system in which "all that is holy is profaned." He charged that it tended to "mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of appendage of a machine." In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Frederick Engels conceded that capitalism "has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together." Nonetheless, Marx prophesied that capitalism would destroy itself: "Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation...
Lester, in fact, is at his very best when he is undercutting the solemn - and often inhuman - pomposities of power on display. This movie's first sequence, for example, shows the musketeers' efforts to rescue a spy from a firing squad, greatly assisted by the fact that a) it requires something like five minutes to load and aim a matchlock gun and b) using this very latest thing in weaponry, an entire squad of men is likely to miss a stationary target not ten paces away. A little later the French monarch and his retinue pause on their...