Word: soliloquys
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lost Force. At his best, Aiken can suggest a mental atmosphere with compelling force. He was one of the forerunners of the still-current rage for Freudian fiction, an early psychological novelist who explored neurotic fear and sexual antagonisms with extraordinary restrained sensuality. Rich in inner soliloquy, barren of drama, his writing is most successful in evocative short stories (notably Silent Snow, Secret Snow, The Last Visit and Mr. Arcularis), where he is able to embody a single emotion in a single carefully worked image...
...women wear vague gowns of no particular century in an attempt to universalize the audience's sense of time. King Hamlet's ghost is merely an offstage voice from the collective unconscious, but Freud's ghost has the free run of Elsinore: whenever Hamlet delivers a soliloquy, he takes refuge in a large hole in the center of the stage, getting in up to his knees, waist or neck, depending on the psychographic depth of the moment. "Nobody loves me or wants me to make a decent career in this lousy court," he whines...
...character in a preposterous situation and still make a playgoer cliffhang over the outcome. The archetypal relationships, father versus son. Nina grieving over the child that will never be born, have unimpaired emotional authority. So do some scenes of Chekhovian poignance. such as Nina's autumnal soliloquy on the meaning of the men in her life and what time has done to her and them...
...hypocrisy. Armies are idiotic. The British upper classes are smugly ignorant of life; the lower classes are self-taught fanatics and uncouth blackguards. As destiny's dutiful darling, G.B.S. slays these asses with his jawbone. Minus his customary wit, Shaw is a nagging scold. In a final soliloquy, delivered with fine evangelistic fervor by Robert Preston, the great iconoclast pitiably begs for an icon worthy of his worship...
...John F. Kennedy is floundering in a sea of troubles," wrote New York Times's Washington Columnist Arthur Krock. "He has reflected the uncertainty of what to do about it that Hamlet expressed in the famous mixed metaphor of the soliloquy. It is this shifting of tactics and moderation that has encouraged some of his opponents to believe they can retire him from the presidency after one term...