Word: english
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Genteel Banter. M.I.T. Humanities Professor Louis Kampf contends that many English teachers now recoil from stressing literature's illumination of life. They fear that voicing strong opinions is not only "a bad breach of manners," but might jeopardize their careers; thus confine themselves to "genteel banter." Historian Staughton Lynd, who has carried his beliefs into angry dissent from the Viet Nam war, criticizes historians who limit themselves to defining and analyzing forces in society. He asks acidly: "Should we be content with measuring the dimension of our prison instead of chipping, however inadequately, against the bars...
...depending on how many are polysyllabic," he says. But despite the nerve-racking restrictions, he pours a remarkable amount of information, polish and tart viewpoint into his reviews. Of the flibbertigibbet comedy import, There's a Girl in My Soup, he observed: "Here we have the sort of English play that prevents the American theater from having a permanent inferiority com plex." Or recently, from off-Broadway If two foul-mouthed mental defectives shouting at each other is your idea of theater, there is The Beard." Of Here's Where I Belong: "As with so many recent musicals...
...criticism at large on radio has won Newman a Peabody Award and i television he has unburdened himself on everything from the declining grammar of the New York Times I he English is not always fit to print") to Charles de Gaulle's crude meddling in Canadian politics ("To put it kindly, he may be losing his grip") to the cliches of sportscasters (Roger Mans, according to a Newman parody, "swings a once potent mace but is still patrolling the outer garden with his ancient skill"). His architectural critique of the late New York World's Fair noted...
...target is a particularly tempting and well-authorized one for Irish assassins from Swift to Shaw: the smug face of English hypocrisy, personified in this case by a sanctimonious divorce judge named Sir Toby Routh. His fiercely prudish sermons from the bench drive adulterers to suicide and his wife to drink. He is as pompous a prig as ever rode a Rolls to work and pride to a fall. But the only tumble Miss Tracy gives him is into the downy bed of Gerda Trauenegg, a well-tuned opera singer from Vienna. Catching him with his wig down, Gerda momentarily...
Miss Tracy firmly skewers Sir Toby on her hook, then lets him off. Instead of savaging him as he deserves, she plays plot games with the side question: Will the antiadultery adulterer get caught? Or else she putters about with the stock characters of English comedy: a gossip columnist straight out of Evelyn Waugh, a giddy old upper-class biddy of the sort invariably played by Margaret Rutherford...