Word: inhumanness
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...metaphors fly back and forth, as both sides try to play on old American themes in order to associate or dissociate New York and the people of this country. To Ford the city is big and inhuman, and that prevents it from being part of the American community; Beame, rather than equating bigness with community by way of retaliation, cloaks his city in a rhetoric of smallness, simplicity and personality. That Beame must deny the city's bigness to defend it as a community shows that the American ideal of city-as-community (like John Winthrop's city...
...unfortunate bracket of time in which he happened to live. He shared neither its energies nor its Angst. He saw modernity as a threat, an encroachment of "terrible simplifiers" on the sturdy, randy freedom of the gypsy artist. "I feel myself personally outraged and assailed by a horrible and inhuman monster," he bombinated in 1908, "a monster begotten by brute Stupidity upon terrified Ignorance, weaned in the lap of Hypocritical Conceit and sponsored by Vulgarity Triumphant-in other words the hideous Dragon of Democratic, Altruistic, Authoritative, Purblind, Pragmatical, Grandmotherly Legislative Force...
...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...