Word: mentalism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...only be appreciated by a civilization dying slowly of self-disgust. Oates' characters are devoid of any sympathetic traits--not only are they lost and lonely, they are faceless and neurotic and filled with hate. Oates strips existential crisis of all its nobility, turning it into a form of mental illness. She transforms spiritual torment into a loathsome disease, a kind of leprosy of the soul...
Oates' point seems to be that when grand existential problems are embodied in real people, they take the form of mental disease. Philosophical dilemmas are noble in the abstract, but in reality they twist people into hideous shapes. Night-Side seems to be an indictment of philosophers on behalf of ordinary people. But in that case, why doesn't Oates show any sympathy for all these ordinary, tortured people? Although she describes her characters with inhuman intelligence. Oates never shows the slightest hint of compassion for them. Her identification of existential despair and mental illness is not so much...
...personal accountability," and went so far as to import a hypnotherapist from Seattle to instruct the Longhorns in "deep relaxation and positive suggestion which eliminates the negative." Says Akers: "The players are committed. You don't come to Texas unless you're a competitor and committed. Mental concentration, though, is harder than physical preparation." As his players looked on first with awe, then growing respect, Akers and his assistants put in grueling 14-hour days. Their dedication proved contagious. Says Interested Observer Royal: "He is willing to pay the price in long hours, elbow grease and getting...
...other contemporary American poet has written more urgently and directly about this fatal shunt than Anne Sexton. Her poems were torn from her life as a daughter, housewife, mother, lover, mental patient and custodian of what she called "the excitable gift." The phrase is from her poem "Live," from a collection that embraced such titles as "Wanting to Die," "Suicide Note" and "Sylvia's Death." Plath (1932-63) and Sexton (1928-74) were friends who spent hours discussing their art, illnesses and the ways they would kill themselves. Yet it is difficult to read Sexton's correspondence...
...streets. The abstraction of architecture casts a chill over the planner's meditations. When he looks at an old man, he peers beyond individual details to "make out the final chapters of Eastern European history, its way of life down to the last coffin nail, its untold mental anguish, its ill-concealed hind thoughts, the well-tended museum of its anxieties, its fits of rage over a strip of grazing land...