Word: tragic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fate would spur some new heroic attitude, and in a minimal way it has. For "Credo quia absurdum [I believe because it is absurd]" these playwrights substitute: I will endure, knowing it is absurd. This is a far cry from the vaulting heroes of past tragedy. The tragic hero must bear full responsibility for his acts, and that is what makes him a thing of the past. Modern intellectual man sees himself as the plaything of powers beyond his reach and shrugs along with Hamlet: "The time is out of joint." The modern mind reduces tragedy to accident and prefers...
...play, The Bald Soprano, it sounds the meaning of all his plays: "The universe is out of control." Better than any other playwright, Ionesco has captured the ludicrous panic that invades modern man in an age of rapidly changing technology. An ardent admirer of the Marx Brothers, Ionesco produces tragic farce by using the proliferation and acceleration of physical objects-much the way that the Marx Brothers in A Night at The Opera piled people and things into a tiny ship's cabin. In The New Tenant, furniture inexorably chokes up every inch of space until the hero...
Ball's conclusion: "Such a Europe [as De Gaulle envisions]-a continent of shifting coalitions and changing alliances-is not the hope of the future; it is a nostalgic evocation. It would not mean progress but a reversion to the tragic and discredited pattern of the past-a return to 1914, as though that were good enough, and with the same guarantee of instability-yet made more dangerous, not less, by the ideological drive of the Soviet Union and the existence of nuclear weapons...
...spread publicity for his opposition to the war in Vietnam. Last summer he declined to attend a White House arts festival, because he said his attendance might be construed as an endorsement of Pres. Johnson's policy. His citation read: "With anguished heart this powerful poet compassionately confronts the tragic complexities of human existence...
...What is most tragic about Vietnam is he decade of wasted opportunity that brought us to our present plight," Merle Fainsod, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor, told members of Radcliffe's graduating class in his Baccalaureate address yesterday. "We have supported a succession of unpopular military regimes in South Vietnam because they were opposed to the Communists; we have only fitfully and sporadically addressed ourselves to the social grievances which movements like the Viet Cong to bring peasants and others to their cause," he said...