Word: microcosm
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...Bergman's concept is less visual-and more chilling. His people never see history; like radiation, it destroys them without touching them. Jan and Eva become aliens in their own marriage. They rage against their cage and at each other. As Samuel Beckett puts it, "The mortal microcosm cannot forgive the relative immortality of the macrocosm. The whiskey bears a grudge against the decanter." Half from fear, half from the desire to have the child Jan cannot give her, Eva sleeps with a friend (Gunnar Björnstrand) who has become a partisan leader. Jan discovers the couple...
THIS monster of a land," he wrote in 1962, "this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm...
...funny if exaggerated enough. Now that may be a sure-fire key to effective political satire (e.g. exaggerate the horrors of war and people will get fed up with it), but it doesn't always make for a good laugh. Dickson, by plugging in tidbits of humor-in-microcosm ("Brackley...worked long and hard on certain aspects of the dissection of a fetal pig"), but overall the joke is strained. In the story, Brackley carves up his girl's face, but she becomes a model. Grotesque? Yes ("Camillia emerged from the bathroom wearing a slip and having a long, thin...
...prep school designed to groom likely lads for their destined place in the Establishment. Like any dutiful upper-class English boy, he journeyed East to govern the lesser breeds as an officer in the Burmese police. The experience was decisive. His sketch Shooting an Elephant is a picture in microcosm of two imperial centuries of interracial injustice and violence. Unlike most people, he could take it but he could not dish it out. Back home on leave, he quit to become a writer. This was rougher duty than bashing natives, or the even rougher self-imposed duty of feeling guilty...
...said that Harvard is a microcosm of American society....Has Harvard fulfilled its obligations to its black students? This year at Harvard there are only TWO courses on Africa. Next year there will be NONE. Yes, Harvard is indeed a microcosm of American society--there is no place for the black man at Harvard...