Dictionary

pseudoenlightenment en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• (US) audio

Etymology

From pseudo- + enlightenment.

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) False enlightenment.
   • One such audience member, catching a ray of pseudoenlightenment, realizes that watching a woman bash people to death for three years has turned him into "a feminist." 2023 April 28, Giri Nathan, “Book Review: 'Chain-Gang All-Stars,' by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 28 Apr 2023:
   • His culminating vision is a pseudoenlightenment, contaminated by his unaltered egoism: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity" (35; emphasis mine). 1991, Thomas Jackson Rice, “The Geometry of Meaning in Dubliners: A Euclidian Approach”, in Style, volume 25, number 1, DeKalb, I.L.: Northern Illinois University, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 397:
   • [T]he social construct of the good life is manifest in these works—an urban American vision framed by the achievements of commerce and of the new pluralist pseudoenlightenment of equal opportunity. 1984, Hal Himmelstein, Television Myth and the American Mind, New York, N.Y. […]: Praeger Publishers, →ISBN, page 114:

Forms