Word: portraits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
University Hall was last renovated in 1896 when the Faculty Room--the two-story bust-and-portrait filled meeting space at the heart of the structure--was re-created by uniting four lecture halls that the original room had been divided into...
Insufficiency, in other words: Joffe's pessimistic portrait almost gloatingly deflates pretensions to humanity and spirituality under the onslaught or ever more ruthless desires and their conniving human servants. As the sex scenes tally up, even the audience gets called on our lewd desires: we see an isolated cabin and hear, ah, the unmistakable sounds of full-on lovemaking--a duet for bedsprings and moans--but are red faced as the real scene turns out to be someone on an exercise bike...
...loosey-goosey but is carefully land-mined with gags--and its characters, who are unremarkable but worth getting to know. Shari, for instance, is a woman at profound discomfort in her bountiful body. Ray treats Shari as a gaudy accessory, and she accepts his evaluation. Elfman paints a nice portrait of a woman fighting for esteem. (Psst: she gets it from...
...evidence to support her strong belief that cultural conditioning, not genetics, molded human behavior. That theme was struck most forcefully in Mead's 1928 classic, Coming of Age in Samoa. It described an idyllic pre-industrial society, free of sexual restraint and devoid of violence, guilt and anger. Her portrait of free-loving primitives shocked contemporaries and inspired generations of college students--especially during the 1960s sexual revolution. But it may have been too good to be true. While few question Mead's brilliance or integrity, subsequent research showed that Samoan society is no more or less uptight than...
...that Orwell "got it wrong," as if it were Orwell's fault that we don't dwell in some ghastly dystopia. His 1984 (published in 1949) is the bitter work of a dying man. Granted, political correctness and language theory haven't become Newspeak just yet. But Orwell's portrait of a debased Britain, singing machine-made pop songs and obsessed with vast public lotteries, has a certain uneasy resonance even...