Word: zeitgeist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Henry Bourne, a junior who came here with Advanced Standing, mulls over the problems of the Zeitgeist postulate in historical writing. Examining Henry Adams' Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages, Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, and Southern's Making of the Middle Ages, Bourne finds that the first two historians tend to invoke a time-spirit to explain the relations between different aspects of medieval culture. The positing of a time-spirit raises questions akin to those of the nominalist-realist controversy which occupied the minds of the medieval man that these historians...
...verse drama, Tynan replied with a vigorous defense of prose. He recalled a remark of his that T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry, the leaders of the back-to-verse movement, reminded him of "two very energetic swimming instructors giving lessons in an empty pool.... I think, when the whole zeitgeist is toward prose, when prose has so recently been made respectable (nobody dreamed of writing a serious play in prose before 1870), when we're learning so rapidly about the possibilities of prose ... I just cannot go along with people, like Eliot, who say that there are realms of human...
Considered either as a play or as Jimmy Porter's interrupted monologue, Look Back in Anger has more substance than can be exhausted or even touched on in this small corner of the editorial page: it combines sociological analysis, a dissection of the zeitgeist, and a moving affirmation of the romantic view that to live fully, even sorrowfully, is better than to live sealed off from experience...
...This Zeitgeist is not captured by the big news stories, as pictured above. Little events make up a spring...
...Train (Harvard '50), son of the late lawyer-writer Arthur Train. Over Pernods at the Chaplain bar in Montparnasse, they agreed that the world badly needed a new little magazine, and scraped together $ 1,000 to start it. Their complaint: "Laden with terms like 'architectonic,' 'Zeitgeist' and 'dichotomous,' the literary magazines seem today on the verge of doing away with literature, not with any philistine bludgeon, but by smothering it under the weight of learned chatter." The Review "put criticism where we thought it belonged: in the back of the book," says Plimpton...