Word: conformists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Right to Oppress. A standard lament of the left is that U.S. liberties are fast dwindling under the pressures of mass, conformist society. Roche, who has investigated early Americans, dissents. There was a greater diversity of communities in the past, he writes, but within the communities no diversity was tolerated. Wise Roman Catholics steered clear of Puritans, Puritans shunned Anglicans, and Mormons avoided everybody: "Colonial America was an open society dotted with closed enclaves, and one could settle in with his cobelievers in safety and comfort, and exercise the right of oppression...
...book shouts, "Shades of Salinger!") Holden, however, was neurotic enough to be a completely original creation. Nicky attends a boarding school where her roommate is a lesbian, desires to find true love, sleeps around, gets pawed by her college president, wants to be an actress although her conformist parents disaprove, jilts her socially-respectable fiance, runs away from home to find herself. She's just an average American girl...
...Identity Crisis." Bright collegians have always flirted with doubt; this generation is married to it. Outwardly conformist, these boys and girls are generally uncommitted to any church or political party. Inwardly romantic, they view everything in personal terms. Nothing is proved; everything is possible-drugs, cheating, abortion. To these students, says a Midwestern professor, "the only real things are intimate things: my girl, my pad, my book, my bottle...
...given some reason to believe that he must learn what is necessary to follow the vocation of being a college professor, or learn nothing. Such a student therefore chooses one or the other of these alternatives, depending on his needs, and tends to become either as academic conformist or a rebel...
...criticism that America's most insightful writer tenders here is valuable, to the point, and necessary. She hits at the substance of middle-class self-deceit, not merely its forms... money, not "pressures," conformist lives, not conformist clothes or appliances. Fortunately, Hellman's skill is such that the power of the criticism serves to accelerate the pace and broaden the spirit of farce. And for all its commentary the play is invariably funny...