Word: twentieths
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...details the outrageous violations made under the name of COINTELPRO, the counter intelligence program, to harass left-wing groups. Still, Ungar did not embark on this mammoth project with a master design. He wasn't out to prove that the FBI has been a source of evil throughout the Twentieth Century. And he didn't try to prove conspiracy theories in which Hoover-as-homosexual was out to take over the country at any time...
...fact, the title of the book is something of a misnomer. Does Friedrich wish to suggest that our society is going crazy, in comparison to previous societies? Or to characterize the process, today as well as then? Or to delineate the peculiarities of twentieth-century madness? Each endeavor requires a frame of reference; but since he has no definitions, he can have no conclusions. The only possible meaning his unlimited overview can give us is an Alice in Wonderland rule of revolving logic: that the irrationality of madness is such that it can never really be defined or predicted, like...
...credit, Martin has captured the sense of confusion about moral choices that pervades twentieth century societies. He suggests a reason for it: "Confusion is a prime weapon of evil." But from that premise he asks us to take a dubious leap of faith with him and accept the Devil as the force wielding that weapon. It is a view that will encounter great hostility from psychologists and social historians; still, Hostage to the Devil, for all its flaws, advances an old theory about an old problem in a new and challenging...
...shores of New York City, his birthplace, to more genteel echelons in Ireland. His first novel, The Ginger Man, instantly revealed an affection for the upper classes and their dirty linen. In creating Sebastian Dangerfield, dissolute hero and impoverished aristocrat, Donleavy unleashed one of the most charming rogues of twentieth century English literature--suave, jaunty, devilishly...
American criticism in the twentieth century has been dominated by a tendency which treats literature as a self-referring activity cut off from all other spheres of life. Since the triumph of the "New Criticism" in the 1920s and '30s, most American critics have conceived their vocation as the illumination of the specifically "literary" qualities of particular works of art. In pursuing this mission, such critics have taken as their chief target various forms of reductionism--claims that a literary work is really about something outside of itself and that its true nature can be comprehended by methods borrowed from...