VV(7) 2

Lorentzen / Nicklaus lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de
Mon Jan 8 04:23:43 CST 2001


JBFRAME at aol.com schrieb:

>  "What do you think of Sartre's thesis that 
> we are all impersonating an identity?" he asks.  Just something he overheard 
> at the Rusty Spoon?  I think not.  


  me i think it's, more than anything else, a smalltalk sample to give the text 
  the flavor of the time. in several of harold brodkey's stories (also in some  
  chapters of "the runaway soul"), which cover about the same period in nyc, you 
  find this kind of talk for pages and pages. and french authors like camus or  
  sartre were back then a major intellectual fashion [not only in america but   
  also here; when i started to read 'seriously' i found in my mother's       
  book-shelf all those rowohlt paperback editions from the 50s]. the thesis     
  itself was not really new back then. it had been, with a slightly different   
  emphasis, formulated by an american thinker decades before: george herbert    
  mead. see "mind, self and society. from the standpoint of a social     
  behaviorist" [1934, posthum], especially part 3 which deals with the notion of 
  "identity". perhaps one could say that benny has not enough "identity" while  
  stencil has too much of it. just a mad man's opinion.

kfl
           




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