Modern Age articles from September 2004

Modern Age archives from September 2004

The school of Fish.(Stanley Fish)
September 22, 2004... IN AN OP-ED PIECE entitled "Why We Built the Ivory Tower," published in The New York Times, Stanley Fish, a literary archon of the theory of deconstruction that has ravaged the academy for years, conveys some departing thoughts, after his...

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: from romantic fallacy to holocaustic imagination.
September 22, 2004... "The only authentic epoche is... victory over desire, victory over Promethean pride." --Rene Girard (1) "When the SStorturer becomes the villain of the war film, he is turned into a sacrificial figure, a scapegoat, [he...

The ongoing campaign of Alger Hiss: the sins of the father.
September 22, 2004... ON NOVEMBER 27, 1954, Alger Hiss was released from the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pensylvania, after serving forty-four months of a five-year-prison sentence for perjury. On that day, surrounded by friends, family, and the press, Hiss...

The memorial dimension in conservative life.
September 22, 2004... I IT IS OFTEN SAID that conservatism is not simply an intellectual movement which seeks to preserve the status quo. After all, the content of the status quo can be inimical to everything the conservative believes to be true: it can destroy...

On leisure and culture: why human things exist and why they are "unimportant".
September 22, 2004... LET ME BEGIN by citing two passages that graphically underscore the themes that I wish to consider here--the things of leisure and culture, of what is and its surprising origins. The first lines are from Gregory of Nazianzen, the great Eastern...

Forgiveness, education, public policy: the road not yet taken.
September 22, 2004... WHILE THERE ARE MANY facets and aspects to educational reform that may contribute to halting the rising tides of violence in our immediate families and in the international family, one dimension is too seldom discussed systematically:...

Dostoevsky vs. the Marquis de Sade.
September 22, 2004... THE MARQUIS DE SADE (1740-1814), libertine, pervert, and pornographer, was also a pivotal figure in Western thought. His novels Justine (1791), Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), The New Justine and Juliette (1797) presented, for the first time,...

The Enduring Mencken.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, by Terry Teachout, New York: HarperCollins, 2002. 432 pp. WHILE THE STATURE OF MOST of the well-known American writers who gained fame in the 1920s was settled long ago, the debate on the lasting...

A Potent Imperium.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy, by Andrew J. Bacevich, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. xiii+300 pp. ANDREW BACEVICH'S American Empire is a first-rate book: important, interesting, and...

Modernism in the Visual Arts.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, by T.J. Clark, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, 2001. 451 pp. THIS IS AN IMPORTANT BOOK, for two reasons. The first is its comprehensive overview of the two-hundred-year...

Exploring Cursileria.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... The Culture of Cursileria (Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain), by Noel Valis, Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 405 pp. WHEN I WAS TEN years of age, almost half a century ago, my family moved from California to Spain. As my...

Portrait of an Age.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... The Victorians, by A. N. Wilson, New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. 724 pp. A. N. WILSON, award-winning novelist, acclaimed biographer, and author of various other writings, sets out in this latest work to paint, as he says, "the portrait of an...

A Difficult Portrait of the Artist.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Flannery O'Connor: A Life, by Jean Cash, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002. 392 pp. AFTER THE PUBLICATION of The Habit of Being in 1979, the award-winning collection of Flannery O'Connor letters edited by Sally Fitzgerald,...

The Passion's severe mercy.(COMMENT)
September 22, 2004... NOW THAT MEL GIBSON'S The Passion of the Christ has left the theaters, we may ask what, if any, lasting impact it will have on our culture. I am not, here, addressing the film's strictly religious effects. Important as those effects will be, I...