Word: backgrounding
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...American battleground under several headings besides law and evangelicism, including Philosophy, Nature, Education, Theology, Political Economy, and the Self. In the published sections, specific opponents are ceaselessly pitted against each other (codification clashes with the Common Law, revivalism with orthodoxy, etc.) while more transcending combat takes place in the background (the head against the heart, union against division). Always a dramatist, Miller emphasizes again and again the outcome toward which these conflicts move, and a great heavy sense of the coming of the Civil War shapes the book's inexorable progress toward tragedy. Miller skillfully does not mention...
...down in Dunn's child-sized chair and walked away with it stuck to the seat of his pants, puffed madly at Dunn's butt-sized cigarettes, and generally behaved in outrageous taste. But somehow by the show's close, against the dull grey background of his colleagues, Moron Maxwell Smart seemed brighter than anybody. And funnier...
...scores through its restraint. Nancy, for example, seeks directions from a surveyor as he positions an assistant carrying the sighting pole, and as the surveyor gestures vigorously the second man sidles over into an open sidewalk elevator. He is seen, however, only as a tiny vanishing figure in the background, and after a quick shot of his puzzlement in the store basement the film whizzes...
...says, "what was new about the writers of the Thirties was not so much their angry militancy as their background. When you thought of the typical writers of the Twenties, you thought of rebels from 'good' families -Dos Passes, Hemingway, Fitzgerald Cummings, Wilson, Cowley. The Thirties were the age of the plebes-of writers from the working class, the immigrant class, the nonliterate class, from Western farms and mills-those whose struggle was to survive...
...elephant whole. The book is a brilliant essay on the traditions and temperament of Asian man, but Dr. Herbert has almost nothing to say about what has happened to those traditions and that temperament in the last 20 years. However, the reader who has foreground but lacks background will be grateful for this vigorous and informative encapsulation of a continent...