Word: modern
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Greek character of Oedipus (Swollen or Wounded Foot) has been employed in modern times to illustrate and to symbolize this affliction. There are very sound psychological and biological reasons why the legs should be affected by the relations between a man and his parents, which is the essence, superficially, of the Oedipus situation. The King's stammer is also relevant here, especially in connection with the right foot...
...women took the family wash and their gossip to "Launderettes," which became a modern urban equivalent to the village well; they flocked to quiz programs where prizes reached a frenetic peak of absurdity. The world learned officially that man had flown faster than sound. In sport, the athlete of the year was a horse; Citation won everything worth winning, was probably the greatest horse of all time. Television became an accepted part of U.S. life...
...doctrine that held that the Government should be something like a modern, bureaucratic Great White Father to all its peoples. Government was expected not only to protect the helpless, but also to make full employment, regulate business and let labor run on a minimum of regulation. It was a doctrine that meant guaranteed security-for the farmer and the worker, and for the old and the sick. In 1948, the U.S. wanted a man who believed in that doctrine. It rejected the party-the Republican Party-which it suspected of wanting to change...
...young (38), unknown French professor of philosophy in 1943 when he published Being and Nothingness, a 700-page look at modern man's predicament. So well did he echo the prevailing French despair that he became a Parisian hero, quit his teaching job and unleashed a flood of controversial writing that included novels, short stories, plays, essays and off-the-cuff journalism. Almost all of it has been a clinical, repetitious elaboration of his grim teaching: wretched man comes into this rotten world through no fault of his own. The concept of God, argues Sartre, is an irrational delusion...
Sartre's style is a thin, derivative brew of Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos and simplified Joyce. It is hard to feel sorry for his gallery of modern misfits, even hard to remember them, probably because he has simply wrenched them out of life's context to illustrate his philosophy of despair. His stories have the effect of leaving the reader temporarily as debilitated as his characters. The feeling doesn't last long. A glance at any familiar living face dissipates...