Word: negativist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Indeed, the first act's very power of assault gives to what follows a diminished impact. But what follows has also too little organic development. The play never really advances from a kind of one-man show to any kind of social drama. To be sure, a negativist, no-exit attitude that shies away from moral crisis cannot develop very far; while at the same time so much overt anger must shut the door on irony. Having shown how angry Jimmy can be, the play chiefly thereafter shows how personally irresistible he is. Perhaps a little concentration on human...
...Hammarskjold's sense of mission derives from two opposing forces that seem forever to be driving him on. Hammarskjold, by his own reading of himself, is simultaneously a mystic and a materialist, a romantic and a realist. As a student, he was deeply influenced by the negativist philosophy of Axel Hagerstrom, who taught that metaphysics is dishonest and only matter real. The influence lingers: when Hammarskjold is talking business, he is as hard as stone. Yet the "Great Deflater," as an old friend calls Hammarskjold, writes intense romantic lyrics and goes roaming through the Lapland mountains in search...