Word: epochs
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...EVERY epoch recreates its own concept of the past. As the climate of opinion shifts over the course of a generation, so do historians' views of history. A series of events as related by one historian may be altered beyond recognition by a later one. Such is the case with American history today. Traditional notions of the past are being brusquely challenged from the left by a group known as revisionists who emphasize not the homogeneity and accomplishments of the American heritage but its massive dislocations and conflicts. Though forming a diffuse movement rather than a well-defined school...
What shocks one epoch may fascinate another. And bore a third. Ten years ago, Rock Hudson pursued Doris Day across what seemed to be miles of snowy sheets. Doris retained her maidenhood beyond the final fadeout (and for many pictures thereafter), but the shrewdly timed movie passed for daring and became one of the biggest box-office hits...
Many custard pies have been thrown in the face of the silent-movie business, but few as sour as The Comic. If its advertisements are to be believed, the movie is simply a fond lampoon of Hollywood's pride-and-pratfall epoch. As the film unreels, it becomes in fact a furious editorial about a business that treats its veterans like overexposed celluloid...
...library of 1850 helps one to understand that epoch in its own terms, as a past present facing an unknown future, rather than through hindsight, as past with known future. Where hindsight finds foolishness, empathy will enable the student to learn how hard it was to avoid foolishness...
From the "sluggish excursions into beauty and truth" which characterized the epoch between the Wars, to Bly's annoyed proclamation in 1953 that MOST OF THE POETRY PUBLISHED NOW-A-DAYS IS OLD FASHIONED. The Advocate vacillated between innovation and a nervous caution. A reaction in the fifties against the poetic domination of Eliot was expressed by Peter Viereck in a parody of Prufrock: "Today the women come and go Talking of T.S. Eliot." Jonathan Culler, in his introduction to the Centennial Anthology, described a magazine that had "stayed Georgian ten years too late during the poetic ferment...