Word: subject
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wary of the assumptions we share with each other. This is, after all, a good rule for conservatives and liberals alike--although these assumptions function differently in the two communities. In the end, I suppose, it just comes back to the importance of keeping an open mind, a subject about which liberals generally have quite a lot to say. We would do well to follow our own advice...
...construction of biography is itself an art form, Wilde's assertion poses a problem for biographers: do you place more emphasis on the life of the subject, or on the artistic value of the biography itself? One of the most controversial and talked about biographies released this fall was Edmund Morris' Dutch, a biography of former president Ronald Reagan that grappled with just this question. By including a fictional character in the midst of his otherwise serious biography, Morris caused an uproar over the standards of factual and historical accuracy in the literary world while asserting his belief...
...never got the sense that that was his limit on their significance and I never got the sense that he wanted to put into words their explicit significance." After all, Rothko himself later pointed out that the murals' crimson backgrounds refer to the "spirit of Harvard," and the subject matter of the murals is a series of H's, contracting and expanding in rhythmic progression...
...rest of the story plays out literally like an irreversible reaction. Rothko, who in addition to being radically innovative with subject matter, was also extremely experimental with media, haphazardly using a variety of unstable compounds such as egg whites and cheap Woolworth's paint. For the Harvard murals, Rothko mixed ultramarine, a stable blue pigment, with lithol red, a highly non-colorfast red hue, to yield the then crimson background. The murals' appearance today is the result of fading due to ultraviolet radiation that shone through the bay window of the penthouse. Furthermore, after the installation, the penthouse was turned...
...clearly designed to make the potential reader reflect upon the pleasant possibilities of imagination. The author, Elaine Scarry, is our own Cabot professor of aesthetics; her impressive list of honors and credentials attest to the feasibility of the academic study of beauty, which might seem too slippery and subjective to bear such scrutiny. Perhaps we should instead see the seeming incomprehensibility of beauty as an invitation to further study; Scarry has a slim volume on this subject out right now, entitled On Beauty and Being Just. In Dreaming by the Book, she asks how literature instructs our imaginations. This...