Word: sinfully
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...Jencks, in his review of Harry Levin's Contexts of Criticism, made some perceptive criticisms of the validity of the academic approach to literature; however, Mr. Jencks has drawn some remarkable moral conclusions from his aesthetic arguments. Mr. Levin, it seems, has committed a "sin" against mankind in pursuing his career in his particular fashion...
What, precisely, is Mr. Levin's "sin?" It is living in a world of words which is "neither dangerous nor implacable;" living in a world in which "nobody suffers more than the loss of a promotion;" living in a world in which "only truth is moral." So, it would seem, Mr. Jenck's desideratum is a dangerous world, a world of considerable suffering, a world in which, apparently, falsehood is moral--in short, the "workaday world...
...save perhaps to depict it, to "breed one work that wakes." Mr. Jencks' fundamental error, I believe, was in allowing an aesthetic criticism of the proundity of Mr. Levin's method of literary analysis to develop into a moral issue denouncing withdrawl into the world of words as a sin of deprivation against mankind. Far from sinning, the men of words produce perhaps one of the greater goods to be found in this world. They create a world of beauty and intensity, to escape from that world which neither wants them, heeds them, nor can benefit from them. One will...
...Hotel Paradiso Bert Lahr is married to a battle-ax, and somehow gets out from under her thumb to seek sin with a beautiful blonde lady. In due course, for one reason or another, he and the lady, her husband's nephew and a lady's maid, the husband himself, and a family friend with four innocent golden-haired daughters, are all cheek-by-jowl or better in a Paris fleabag. Upstairs and down they scamper, in and out of rooms they dash, till the gendarmes come rushing in at the second-act curtain...
Everyman is probably the most superb and crafted of the vast genre of medieval morality plays. Perhaps the closest thing to real "folk drama," the morality play is charming by reason of a naivete of style combined with a poignant knowingness of human nature and foibles. An allegory of sin and redemption, Everyman is perhaps the most powerful and best known "idea play" in Western dramatic literature...