Word: modernism
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...related danger is to romanticize and sentimentalize the family. From the Greek tragedians to the modern psychoanalysts, men have known that the family, along with being a source of immense comfort, is also a place of savage battles, rivalries, and psychological if not physical mayhem. Psychoanalyst R.D. Laing says that the "initial act of brutality against the average child is the mother's first kiss." He finds it hurtful that a child is completely at the mercy of his parents, even to having to accept affection. Laing's colleague, David Cooper, calls the nuclear family the "ultimately perfected form...
...labor's demands for more wages and fringes hardened. The nation lost more working time through strikes-60 million man-days-than in any year in the past decade. Major union contracts negotiated in the first nine months of 1970 called for annual increases averaging 10%. In a modern form of highway robbery, the militant Teamsters imposed a 15% increase, thus setting a target for the rest of organized labor. To head off what could have been a nation-paralyzing strike, Congress voted to give a boost of 13½% to some 350,000 railway workers. Wage-push inflation...
Nowhere does Dickens seem more modern than in his treatment of London. He prowled its streets at night so much during his lifetime that he found it hard to write without the inspiration of his "magic lantern," as he called the city. When he pulled the reader along, says Wilson, he brought the first "cinematic mobility" to the English novel: long tracking shots, like Oliver Twist's escapades in grimy alleys, where the scenes flash by like some satanic carnival; wide panoramas, like the scene in the brickyard in Dombey and Son, where the city lies on the horizon...
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...
...also is fascinating that, in an essentially repressed society, murder and violence seem to have occurred about as frequently as they do now in the "liberated" freewheeling modern world. Indeed, when set against Altick's grisly social canvas the current scene seems almost heartening. Unfortunately, the book is afflicted with the compulsive attention to micro-detail that distinguishes scholarly research from literary communication...