Word: controversialists
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...Podhoretz has been a brilliant controversialist, speaking from the left and, for the last 30-odd years, from the right. He has defended America against attacks from both left and right. He has always sought, by means of his writing and editing, to do what Whitman dreamed of doing with his poem - sort out the mess, make it coherent, whole...
Where are the borders between those roles? In the great conflation, by what standards is a controversialist-politician to be judged? Hence the further problem: Does Pat Buchanan mean what he says, or is he merely putting on a great show of fire breathing and machete work to stir up the audience, as he was paid to do on Crossfire? Does it matter whether he means what he says? The question may be as silly as trying to judge the intentions of an adolescent who strikes matches one after another and tosses them toward piles of dry leaves...
...from the start that the critic's customary place as a dim lurker in the shadows was not for him. A bourgeoise childhood (he was the bastard son of a merchant who achieved knighthood) in provincial Birmingham taught him his lifelong horror of grayness. His legendary Oxford career as controversialist, actor, debater, director, dandy and libertine imbued him with his tropism toward fame's warming light. Indeed, it might be argued that his life's central mistake was the innocent notion that he might dominate the great world as he once had the great university...
Brigid Brophy, the Irish controversialist, classics scholar, champion of animal rights and vegetarian, continues her war on the 20th century. In Transit, her sixth novel, takes the fight underground, where it is more likely to be seen. The book is a highly cerebral contrivance that cannibalizes such literary conceits as puns, anagrams, typographical innovations, styles of alienation and cultural shock. These are then excreted as parodic wastes, which, in turn, become a further source of nourishment. With such transcendent offalness, Miss Brophy seeks a form suited to her view of the times...
...character of institutional Christianity in The Church Against Itself (Herder and Herder; $5.50). Married and the mother of three, Mrs. Ruether has a doctorate in religion from California's Claremont Graduate School and is a lecturer at Howard University in Washington. She gained early notoriety as a Catholic controversialist with a 1964 article in the Saturday Evening Post called "Why I Believe in Birth Control," in which she argued that the church's ban on contraception was injurious to a healthy marriage. More recently, she has argued with equal vigor in favor of relaxing the church...