Word: verbalism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...time when so many novelists are merely tinkering with far-out techniques or grinding out hunks of undigested raw material, Nabokov is an artist who fastidiously constructs intricate plots and dazzling verbal mosaics. He creates books without precedent in form (Pale Fire) or treatment (Lolita). He can also be a clever ice skater, stylishly tracing or following someone else's figures-the Conradian Laughter in the Dark, for example, or the Kafkaesque Invitation to a Beheading...
...Unknown Soldier and His Wife. The only evil of war left unmentioned in Peter Ustinov's three-hour verbal artillery barrage at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater is the antiwar play. Despite a sprinkling of quips, Ustinov lays down a lethal set of pacifist platitudes that ultimately calls for an intellectual gas mask...
...they turn out to be wrong. Law and all social institutions need to be questioned and challenged. The great philosopher Martin Buber was fond of pointing out that the Jews of the Old Testament constantly insisted on talking back to God, and that the back-talk was not exclusively verbal either. In the words of Scott Buchanan, "Laws are not dogmas; they are questions to be pursued." It will be a black day indeed when we have no Antigones among us. They have a special glory and a special immortality of their...
Only last year, many sociologists and psychiatrists dismissed the hippie hegira with a verbal flick of the wrist. The use of mind-changing drugs such as LSD, said National Institute of Mental Health Director Stanley Yolles in 1966, was a fad, "like goldfish swallowing." City officials blandly waited for the hippies to go away; indeed, a year ago they had established scarcely half a dozen inchoate colonies...
...younger than the former one, even though he now sits down more than he did before. And he now relies more strongly on the motive of revenge than he used to. Carnovsky has wholly mastered that curious unique diction used by Shylock, with its short bursts of speech and verbal repetitions; he has assimilated it so well that he has even added a few repetitions...