Word: moralisms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...once read, a California artist, but a world figure. He is not an avant-gardist either, and his work keeps alluding to its sources: the color to Bonnard and Matisse, the strong, fractionally unstable drawing to Mondrian and Matisse again. Diebenkorn's best paintings mediate between the moral duty to acknowledge the ancestor and the desire to claim one's own experience as unique, unrepeatable. In short, he is a thoroughly traditional artist, for whose work the words "high seriousness" might have been invented...
There is nothing sacred or familial about the book's characters. Doctors, architects, models, painters and intellectuals, they inhabit the chic world of urban haute bourgeoisie. Moral conventions and religious convictions have been replaced by easy sex and superficial nostalgia. At a party, two women sing the '40s hit Chattanooga Choo-Choo, while an argument ensues over whether there were three or four Andrews Sisters. Inane chat, vacuous stares, Bauhaus settings and Pucci puppets form a familiar narrative glaze...
Trilling's failure to go beneath the surface level of the phenomena she describes seems to come in large part from her conviction that the function of the social commentator is primarily as a moral guide. The critic, she argues, should insure that we do not lose sight of "the continuing dynamics of culture," that we will remember that "codes for the guidance of our moral lives are constantly being proposed for us by the culture even where the social standards which are being invoked seem most precisely to prohibit recourse to moral criteria." What she is saying, through...
Typically, Trilling turns again to an external explanation of the students' behavior and makes a moral judgment, rather than making a deeper effort to understand a younger generation's anger at its society. She cannot question the institutions of her society, nor can she see that it is those very institutions that have instilled in these Radcliffe students their ignorance of the underprivileged...
...TYPICAL murder mystery of any era, the delineations of good and evil are always clear. On one side is the bad guy, the man who has flaunted all social and moral conventions by taking the life of another human being. On the other side stands a force representing society, automatically identified as the good guy, no matter how perverse or corrupt the person or organization may be. For example, even Dirty Harry, the psychopathic vengeance-seeker, becomes one of the "good guys" within this basic framework. These opposing forces usually are taken for granted, and most murder mysteries...