Word: heroic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Gore Vidal, Allen Drury and Tom Wicker (the novelist) share with Richard Nixon a common flaw: all have failed to make our capital city believable. One explanation of why Washington fiction is so lame may be that while the stages and settings are of heroic size and the plots involve the fate of nations, the figures shouting speeches and shaking swords seem absurdly tiny...
...persecutions, and to democratize the regime. Each in his own way addresses himself to the world, and their words resound with concern for the future of humanity. Thus, they are attempting to halt the infernal cycle of mutual hatred and military adventures. Sakharov, who is leading this heroic battle, is supremely worthy of the Nobel Prize...
Right after World War II, the private eye replaced the cowboy as hero, in the eyes of the average white middle class man on the street. The heroic image had changed with the environment--increasing urbanization, progress, etc. But this didn't stop certain filmmakers from making Westerns. Ford and Peckinpah continued making good Westerns, but did it by altering their concepts; Ford by turning inward, studying "the American's struggle between self-destruction and life affirmation," to quote John Landau in the latest Rolling Stone; Peckinpah reacted similarly, by examining the end of the Old West...
...which no traveler returned. Nude Descending a Staircase was at once the scandal and centerpiece of exhibitions from Paris to New York. The work was no mere rendering of cubist theory. It was mechanistic, sensual and impudent. It held nothing sacred−not even iconoclasts. Thus Nude performed the heroic task of simultaneously galling public, critics and the avantgarde. At the New York Armory show a reviewer spoke for his fellows when he described it as an "explosion in a shingle factory." Crowds had to be restrained from damaging the painting. Back home, Futurists and Cubists considered the naked body...
...with such popularity, the story was denounced as escapist fantasy, its success owlishly attributed to "irrational adulation" and "nonliterary cultural and social phenomena." Attempts to straitjacket Tolkien's story as contemporary allegory were updated too. In the '50s, critics averred, Sauron was really Joseph Stalin and fumbling, heroic Frodo was the West...