Word: milieu
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...director of the show, Margaret Potter, associate curator of Painting and Sculpture, has realized her contextual statement in the belief that the Stein context defines itself; she has not emphasized the intellectual milieu of the Steins by clarifying their ideas about these works, but instead has arranged the show primarily by chronology, evoking a historical document with an assumption of intellectual history in the visual and literary arts of the Stein era. The catalogue clarifies some of the literary trends and ideas, but the visual thinking is limited. Still, there are a few excellent examples of visual clarification...
Dickens was the first poet of the modern industrial city: he saw it not only as a milieu but as a destiny. The characters he propelled through it were both its living parts and the fuel it consumed. Their hugeness, their stylization, their compulsive verbalizing are all in part a response to the pressures the city exerts on them. This, as Critic V.S. Pritchett has pointed out, is the kinship that urbanized modern readers have with them: a dependence on the "private, mythmaking faculty" by which people dramatize their existence in a mass society. It is a kinship with Dickens...
...foil for intellectual exegesis, nor a didactic object lesson for humane politicos or members of the Woodstock Nation. It is simply a novel about two impoverished white boxers whose lives touch only for an instant, but whose careers frighteningly parallel each other. By remaining true to his California milieu, by neither moralizing about his characters' profession or condescending to their way of life, Gardner lays bare some ugly truths about an America which closes off possibilities for tragedy or greatness-a society which neglects the mass of its individuals, leaving them to stumble through life in a comatose state, rarely...
...narrow milieu does not only limit, however; it also increases the probability of the chance encounters on which the narrative of Ma Nuit Chez Maud is based. Jean-Louis counts on chance. luck. And his luck is good because he scientifically applies his will to it, as when he picks up his wife-to-be with the full intention of marrying her. Comprehending his possibilities and limitations, he can neither renounce the world and become a saint, nor marry Maud. who is a free-thinker. Either way, to want everything or nothing, you've got to be crazy...
...holy fools of God." A few others become the minions of hell and savage their brothers for a bread crumb. But the bulk of men remain the same, irretrievably wedded to their petty vices and their tepid virtues. For them, the prison camp is a change in milieu, not a change in character. Such is the breadth and depth of Solzhenitsyn's vision that he chooses to be the voice of these voiceless and mediocre many. Without ever resorting to formal religious terminology, he says in effect that each of these humdrum souls is precious and equal...