Carol Iannone

However much traditional standards are leveled in our late democratic society, American theater will persist in challenging putatively oppressive values and the figures who enforce them.  So I concluded after seeing Wit, the play by Margaret Edson that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 and is . . . . Continue Reading »

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by edward j. larson basic, 318 pages, $25, $14.95 If there are moments in history when “the road not taken” might have changed the course of events, the famous “Monkey Trial,” held in Dayton, . . . . Continue Reading »

In the middle of the hot summer of 1925, the famous “Monkey Trial” took place in Dayton, Tennessee, a small town of about eighteen hundred people in the Cumberland Valley. A young teacher named John Scopes stood accused of violating the Butler Act, a measure passed earlier that year to restrict . . . . Continue Reading »

When presidential candidate Bob Dole castigated the entertainment industry for excessive and graphic use of violence, it was only the latest salvo in a culture war that has been raging for some time. Arguments over government funding of offensive art, renewed efforts to restrict pornography, . . . . Continue Reading »

Contemporary feminism began some decades ago with what Betty Friedan called the “feminine mystique”-the notion that women had been trapped into thinking of full-time wife-and-mothering as their path to fulfillment. The feminine mystique went on to become the defining and energizing idea of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Those who began to study literature before the radicalization of the university in the 1970s learned that literary criticism was not only a valid undertaking in itself but a way to understand the larger culture and, indeed, the human condition in general. For a time, it seemed that just as much of . . . . Continue Reading »