Word: moralisms
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This thesis makes relevant all of Fowles' seemingly disjointed literary games, documentary digressions and attempts to make the Victorian past appear imminent to our present. In a cunningly oblique way, the whole novel employs an old-fashioned method to draw a timeless moral. As Fowles' epigraph from Marx puts it: "Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself...
Like Diogenes, Stephen Becker has spent most of his career as a novelist searching for an honest man-or at least a protagonist who can face a tough moral decision with honesty. In A Covenant with Death, a youthful judge must decide the fate of a man who kills his executioner after being convicted of a murder that he did not commit. Juice concerns a wealthy businessman fighting the machinery mobilized to exonerate him of the drunken-driving death of a pedestrian. Now, in his sixth novel, Becker, 42, turns back to the Civil War. In an excellent period morality...
...remembered some of the "sex education" films I'd seen in high school. It struck me that none of them had contained any information on birth control. One movie on unwanted pregnancy, a melodrama called "Phoebe," carried with it the moral that the way to avoid pregnancy was to avoid sex until marriage. In the plight of poor pregnant Phoebe, afraid to tell her boyfriend or her parents, missing out on all the fun the gang was having, there was no mention of foams, diaphragms or the pill...
...Weekend's antecedents in American gangster and romance pictures depended on their characters' moral sensitivity; reaching to the films' violent events, the characters made sense out of them by judging them. The complete breakdown of moral perception in Weekend's characters destroys the continuity and moral progress of the narrative. Godard leaves his characters and story, and so his audience, adrift in a world bursting into flames and rubbish for want of moral individuals to control them. Mickey One expresses the disintegration of individual personality. Penn's post-Wellesian conception of an isolated character becomes quite paranoid...
...scarcely reached the proportions of a symptom of widespread decadence (though visitors sometimes wonder as they observe the lounging male whores on New York's Third Avenue or encounter male couples embracing effusively in public parks). Still, the acceptance or rejection of homosexuality does raise questions about the moral values of the society: its hedonism, its concern with individual "identity." The current conceptions of what causes homosexuality also pose a fundamental challenge to traditional ideas about the proper role to be played by all men and women. In recent years, Americans have learned that a man need...