Word: zeitgeist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...taste of being an international city may raise our expectations culturally and aesthetically." Roberts' hopeful and boosterism sounds almost quaint: it has been at least a dozen years since World's Fairs -grand, unself-conscious celebrations of progress and technology - were right in step with the Zeitgeist. But Knoxville, a latecomer to urbanity, is excited anyway. Even John Austin, ambivalent about the enterprise, appreciates the hoopla. Says he: "We'd still be a backwater town on the banks of the Tennessee River without the fair." -By Kurt Andersen...
...Brando's remark testifies to Odets's incredible success in capturing the Zeitgeist of the 1930s, it also gives a hint of tragic flaws buried beneath the success. Although Odets would live and write well into the early 1960s, he strived, unsuccessfully, to break out of the role of spokesman for a decade that was over before he had turned...
...Word (theory and manifestos) over the Act (workable buildings). Real populist architecture has no chance. Within the taste centers, Wolfe says, "there was no way for an architect to gain prestige through an architecture that was wholly unique or specifically American in spirit." What was this spirit, this ignored Zeitgeist? Tailfins and Empire: "the Hog-stomping Baroque exuberance of American civilization." Those who did serve it were banished as apostates, and become the heroes of Wolfe's narrative: John Portman, Morris Lapidus, Eero Saarinen and Edward Durell Stone...
Presidential styles are always a matter of elaborate psychological discretion and democratic fine tuning. A President cannot in any important way violate the values of his people or the spirit of his time; not with impunity, anyway. A President, being standin, scapegoat and exemplar, works even closer to the Zeitgeist than Phil Donahue. Before the sumptuous Reagan Inaugural, Barry Goldwater objected: "When you've got to pay $2,000 for a limousine (four-day rental required at $500 per), $7 to park and $2.50 to check your coat, at a time when most Americans can't hack...
Blame literary fashion or the Zeitgeist, but novels seem to be growing ever less capacious. Those that find room for historical sweep or the intricacies of public affairs can usually squeeze in only pasteboard heroes and heroines. The ones that concentrate on fine-tuned psyches or dark nights of the soul generally admit the outside world as nothing more than a nuisance or irrelevant noise. Fewer and fewer new novels attempt to bridge this gap, to extend complex characters beyond the tight little domain of solipsism...