Abstract

The Ruins of Memory
Herbst, Josephine | April 14, 1956 issue

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What seems to be missing in a good deal of contemporary writing is a sense of the world. The great authors to come up since the Second World War have mostly been dead a long time. The writings of the detached past became a kind of smokescreen to conceal the present dilemma, and the ruins. If past history is any guide, the present phase that tends to the compulsive presentation of people as isolated moral atoms without any sensible relation to society or the ideas of their time ought to have departed before this. For literary epochs come and go but this wave seems to have frozen in the cold war.

See Also:

LITERATURE; WRITING; AUTHORS; RUINS in literature; COLD War; WORLD War, 1939-1945
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