Читать книгу Modern Anxiety, Modern Woman - Lida Prypchan - Страница 1

This collection of essays spans many years. Roughly divided into fiction, criticism and a wider social analysis - these pieces are an attempt to express what I see. In literature, in film, in history and in life - I have tried to elucidate patterns, and exceptions, with some (I hope) psychological coherence.

Why Modern Anxiety? Anxiety has always been with us, but what is anxiety in a technological society? If our tolerance for sensory stimulus is finite, when do we reach breaking point in our frenetic world with its 24 hour media, its visual onslaught, its relentless material aspiration? If happiness is found in moderation, what becomes of us in a world of extremes? These are the threads that run through this collection - with an occasional glance back at more innocent times. Emily Brontë forged, arguably, the most passionate novel in literature from an ascetic daily life inconceivable to most of us, accustomed as we are to distraction. Both over and under stimulated, seduced and sedated by easy-won pleasures - are we losing the facility to reach below the surface?

Why Modern Woman? There is a focus in these pieces on the outer reaches, or extremes, of the romantic experience - impossible love, tragic love, disappointments that scar us for life. Are these ‘female’ themes, or simply attempts to describe the most human of experiences? Undoubtedly we see more writing by and about women, but after millennia of silence, of being almost entirely undocumented and without context - do we even know what a woman is? Ecclesiastes says there is no new thing under the sun, but perhaps a new perspective is possible - and what a weary world needs most.

I have tried to employ honesty and humor in these writings and to trace an analysis of human behavior through time, from a 16th century Spanish court to post-war Hollywood to the diets, marriages and dissatisfactions of today. A theme emerges of a changing world colliding with unchanging human nature, but, as with any theorizing at some point we must abandon our efforts to make sense - and yield to the complexity, the perversity and the unknowability of the world and of our own minds.

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