Word: criticism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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They deserve better, even from 20th century man, says Critic and Biographer Theodora Ward. Modest, scholarly, at times profoundly thoughtful, her new look traces the story of angel visitations through theology, philosophy and art from angelic beginnings in Jewish and Christian scriptures up to the present. Miss Ward's conclusion: angels are in for a renaissance...
Where does romanticism lead? In one of its incarnations, the romantic fascination with myth, tribe and race led, ultimately, to the barbarities of Hitler. If the "traditional checks on human nature should be removed," wrote Critic Irving Babbitt in his classic Rousseau and Romanticism, "what emerges in the real world is not the mythical will to brotherhood but the ego and its fundamental will to power." Yet romanticism also reconfirms the value of the individual. In many ways, the movement expands personal freedom, and the strength of liberal democracy owes a considerable debt to 19th century romantics, who championed civil...
Perhaps, eventually, people will grow tired of the "late sensate" society and once again want a hardworking, hard-value nation, an "ideational culture" (to use another of Sorokin's terms). Pop Critic Richard Goldstein pictures a future in which college students, rebelling against the rebels of the '60s, might be decidedly placid and prim. "What if students opt out of the scenarios we have devised?" he asks. "What if the goals of our rebellion seem suddenly uncool? After all, every movement carries its own antithesis." What, in short, if the '70s are not sensate but square? Possible...
...most decades. The Depression, World War II and the cold war were all shattering crises that temporarily created a spirit of national consensus and obscured the tensions within the society. "Now," says Sociologist Daniel Bell, "the historic tendency of the culture is reasserting itself." Adds Susan Sontag, the radical critic and novelist: "It is a kind of false nostalgia to look upon consensus as being normative." For much of the next decade, the U.S. is likely to be an increasingly fractious, and perhaps an increasingly violent and polarized society...
THERE IS a collection of essays called Hamlet: Enter Critic in which critics do their thing with what is perhaps the greatest work in English literature. They are essentially puzzled over the play's great enigma: what took hamlet so long in acting to avenge his dead father? Among the theories advanced are that Hamlet was fat, and consequently moved slowly in doing anything; that Hamlet hand an Oedipal relationship with his mother and therefore blamed himself for his father's death; and finally, an Elizabethan determinist interpretation that Hamlet's humours mixed in such a way that...