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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