Word: viewings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...responsible critic comes to understand the complex machinery by which change must be accomplished, finds the key points of leverage, identifies feasible alternatives, and measures his work by real results. The irresponsible critic never exposes himself to the tough tests of reality. He doesn't subject his view of the world to the cleansing discipline of historical perspective or contemporary relevance. He defines the problem to suit himself. He can spin fantasies of what might be, without the heartbreaking, backbreaking work of building social change into resistant human institutions. Out of such self-indulgent and feckless radicalism come...
From his point of view, the Pope had good reason for the outbursts. Although the Vatican has by now be come accustomed to the public defection of priests, it was shocked by the recent resignations of two young, promising bishops. In Chile, the Most Rev. Gabriel Larrain Valdivieso, 44, auxiliary to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Santiago, left the priesthood for secular humanitarian work. In Peru, Bishop Mario Cornejo Radavero, 41, auxiliary to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Lima, reportedly brought his cardinal to tears by resigning to marry. Priestly defections have even touched the Vatican itself, where an honored member...
Backward Film. Vonnegut's view of man is not new. Indeed he sometimes sounds eerily like the 16th century mystic Sebastian Franck. Appalled by the cruelties men worked upon one another in the name of religion during the Reformation, Franck wrote: "Whoever looks at mankind seriously may break his heart with weeping." Then he added: "We are all laughingstocks, fables and carnival farces before God." Formal belief in God seems to have no part in Vonnegut's philosophy, though in Slaughterhouse-Five he does suggest that the story of the Crucifixion would be more appealing if Jesus...
...writer might be resentful of the past. But Vonnegut holds no grudges. He is, in general, a man more rueful than wrathful. Black-humorist contemporaries often vibrate with a febrile, apocalyptic rage, seeming to feel that America has the market cornered on greed and hypocrisy. Vonnegut takes a longer view. Though he has an old-fashioned Populist's distrust of the rich and powerful manipulators of society, Vonnegut's is closer kin to Twain than Kafka. Deeply pessimistic about the world, he is rarely depressed by it. Part of him, at least, would contemplate even the story...
...spine of Burgess's criticism is philosophical, and he has found his archetypal literary enemy in a most unusual source. In Burgess's view the worst modern vices (materialism, pragmatism, relativism) may be traced to the works and influence of the heretical English monk Pelagius, who denied original sin and, 1,500 years before Marx-or Harold Wilson-taught that human perfection was obtainable by civic means. There is an opposite, more severe, tragic tradition that he identifies with the moral absolutism of Saint Augustine. One or other of these disparate attitudes may be detected by Burgess...