Word: genericizing
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...Shakespeare masterpiece, at best to a crushing overemphasis on Shylock's role, so that the play becomes a one-man tragedy. Ask most people the name of the merchant of Venice, and they will answer "Shylock" more frequently than "Antonio." Antonio has not passed into the language as a generic term; "Shylock" is one of the most durable neologisms we owe to Shakespeare. The way that Shylock engrosses the play, crowding out the rest of the characters, is not an exclusively modern event (it is probably part of the romantic desire to see heroes in villains and vice versa, that...
...Well, I'm labelled class of '50 but my real class should be '48, I think," could be called a generic statement of the time...
...flexibility of human nature makes it impossible to distinguish generic influences on human behavior, Lewontin said...
...modes classifies literature "by the hero's power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same." They theory of symbols works on the basic principle of "polysemous meaning" in works. The theory of myths expands on Frye's basic premise in Fearful Symmetry. And generic criticism (using terms like drama, epic. and lyric) explains works in the context of "conditions established between the poet and his public," how literary works "are ideally presented...
...editors' organization of entries into sections entitled Love, Work, and Power provides for powerful articulation of this generic reality. The Love section deals with the contradictions inherent in the male vision of woman in terms of her function for others. This reduction goes to the extent of suggesting that love, whose essence is response to and support of another, is woman's "work," a concept of a fundamentally different order. However much sacrifice and abnegation involved, work has for the male remained a willful manipulation of ideas and material in the external world. The entries in the Power section...