"My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries," Ms. Willis wrote in an essay collected in Beginning to See the Light (Knopf, 1981).

She continued:" Yet the modernists' once-subversive refusal to be gulled or lulled has long since degenerated into a ritual despair at least as corrupt, soft-minded, and cowardly--not to say smug--as the false cheer it replaced. The terms of the dialectic have reversed: now the subversive task is to affirm an authentic post-modernist optimism that gives full weight to existent horror and possible (or probable) apocalyptic disaster, yet insists--credibly--that we can, well, overcome. The catch is that you have to be an optimist (an American?) in the first place not to dismiss such a project as insane."