Word: paradox
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...recent years, however, the style of criticism has increasingly come into crisis, largely because it generated a disturbing paradox. On the one hand, the autonomy and privileged status of cirticism depends on the contention that literature provides crucial insights for moral and political life. But on the other hand, the formalistic method to which this autonomy gave rise reduces literature to an elaborate arrangement of patterns and designs, to a trivial if complex amusement, which is devoid of significance because it lacks any connection with human values. Thus American literary criticism has had little to offer those genuinely concerned with...
...agricultural worker resists the sexual advances of the local squire, Marcus reads a significant change in social consciousness, the rise of the belief that class privileges should not afford sexual dominion over the persons of social inferiors. He connects this reading to a central theme of his book, the paradox that Victorian morality had a humanizing as well as a repressive side...
...seem ironic that a director who claims politics as her central concern should be so violently antipolitical at the core, and that the most successful leftist director of recent years should turn out to be a stoic in disguise. But in fact, this paradox accounts for much of her success. But in fact, this paradox accounts for much of her success. Her audience understands the message of her films better than she seems to herself; that message speaks to popular if sinister themes of the seventies, legitimating the pursuit of private pleasure and ambition in the name of the impossibility...
...fact," writes Bell, the chief characteristic of the Establishment "is its eagerness to repudiate its own existence." The condition of art is echoed in politics and the economy. Capitalists have lost faith in their enterprise and are listless about defending it. Capitalism's very success has created a paradox: hard work, discipline and organization make capitalism successful. But the goods it abundantly produces encourage a mindless pursuit of hedonism. Capitalism is thus deprived of any "moral or transcendent ethic." There is a further paradox. The greater the economic growth under capitalism, the higher the expectations. People demand more government...
Nixon was interested in the conference, Mayer said, because hunger was the only social problem that he believed he could solve in one term. "It is a paradox of history that while Nixon was not elected to feed the poor, he did more in that area than Kennedy or Johnson," Mayer observed...