Word: selfhood
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...latest novel, Robert Penn Warren combines a Southern preoccupation with the past with a typically modern concern with selfhood and alienation. His protagonist literally revels in his aloneness, his rootlessness, his inability to love. Nor is he content with a mere demonstration of his problems; instead, he explains them to us, over and over again, in a style that mixes the lofty literary references of academic--Jed is a medievalist at the University of Chicago--with Faulknerian neologisms and strings of appositives...
...antifeminist, but she objects sharply to the rhetoric of the women's movement-at least in its more extreme forms. It has done considerable harm, she feels, by lumping housework and child care together and dismissing them as something that women must escape in order to achieve "selfhood." It has also deluded women about both the pleasures and the problems of commercial work and about the ease of being a responsible parent and pursuing a career at the same time. (A large part of all work done by men and women is boring and unsatisfying and, as men know...
...however, the law is an instrument that can be bent, Nixon-like, to suit any ends, and More is condemned finally on the basis of suborned evidence. The quality that ensures his doom is for Bolt the very one which confirms his triumph: his unwillingness to let go of selfhood, to subordinate conscience to serpentine expeidiency...
...Wreckage of Agathon is individual freedom within a mass consciousness. Agathon chose total individual freedom, rebelling against the Spartans' strict sense of uniformity. And although he died, his ideals achieve a harmonious serenity with the hopes of his more worldly-wise student, Demodokos. Grendel, too, embodies a kind of selfhood, which is more barbaric and cynical: he believes completely in himself only because there is no hope of being accepted within a greater whole. It's hard to suppress sympathy for this Cain-like character, but in the end the victory of mankind over the individual is inevitable...
Primeval isolation, a selfhood that is a mystery most of all to oneself, an animal sense of mortality-these are the terrors Miss Atwood has to offer. Technology, social sophistication, are transparent pretenses behind which man is naked, with drooling fang and club at the ready. Dealing in the artifices of well-made verse and well-made novel, she convincingly suggests that the overcivilized and the barbarous are one. Yet the Atwood message is beyond formulated pessimism; it has the rhythmic cycling of hope and despair natural to life itself. A lyricism as honest as a blade of grass...