Word: conceits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Eventually the idea of sexual restraint became an important element in that brocaded bag of tricks known as courtly love. But it took the cleverness of Baldassare Castiglione, a 16th century popularizer of Platonic love treatises, to humanize the conceit for sophisticated courtiers. In The Book of the Courtier (1528), Castiglione distinguished between sensual love and what he called rational love. Rational love, he said, puts greater emphasis on the senses of sight and hearing. He argued that as conduits for soul mergers, the eyes and ears are superior to the mouth, which responds to the inflammatory sense of touch...
...second emphasis, in its examination of insanity, The Four-Gated City offers one such vindication. For Lessing, the Coldridge townhouse is an elaborate metaphorical conceit--at its base, in its cellar, it house Linda, Mark's mad wife. In another novel produced during another time, Linda would have probably been left to her solitary fate--most probably, like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, Linda would have simply destroyed herself. At best, she could only hope to remain locked up for life, half-mad, in a Gothic tower. But, in this novel, Linda is treated as a prophet as she conducts Martha...
...tantalizing simplicity-a column of polished steel, a square sheet of blank paper with a single word such as "Sky" lettered on it, a wooden booth with a small plaque in it labeled "Suicide." Each is intended to convey or stimulate some arcane, fey or fiendish compulsion or conceit...
...Count's living theatre works just fine until the inevitable ingenue (Ellen Endicott-Jones) upsets all the artificial relationships. Anouilh never has time to exploit The Rehearsal's central conceit for he soon finds himself struggling to protect his ingenue from the cynics that surround her. Hero, the Count's alcoholic friend, takes over and the play sloshes forward lugubriously. Humbert Allen Astredo delineates his drunkenness with sensitivity, but there's just so much Anouilh packed into his long monologues, that he can't help but become tiresome...
...foundations and the multiple demands made on the school by the neighborhood, big business, and government. Before he attempted this outline, Barzun apprenticed for twelve years as Dean of Faculties and Provost at Columbia. Since the "hero" of the book is naturally Columbia, his remarks on violence and student conceit have more than routine interest...