For all it's acting pyrotechnics and feedback loops and wah-wah-pedal effects – Anderson riffs on his actors the way Hendrix did on his guitar strings – the story stubbornly refuses to let its characters develop Anderson's conception of character is almost entirely static, entropic.
Such studies pose a problem not only for the commonsense conception of character traits, but also for virtue ethics, which appear to assume the possibility of achieving stable character traits that are virtues.
This may also be a reason that Shakespeare's conception of character changed.
Power, or Caro's understanding of it, also underlies his conception of character and structure.
As was typical of ancient authors, he had no conception of character as developing through the course of a lifetime.
High-feminine instead of fetishistically masculine, glittery rather than gritty, and daring in its conception of character, "Sex and the City" was a brilliant and, in certain ways, radical show.
Like many before him, Pamuk suggests that Shakespeare did much to shape the modern conception of character as embodying more than "a single, basic attribute", offering instead protagonists who are complex entities "shaped by conflicting impulses and conditions".
"It's too big, too broad, too stuffed with competing storylines, whirligig digressions and the operations of authorial whim to permit of a continuous conception of character," objected Tim Martin in the Independent on Sunday.
Though showing great sensitivity to environmental or sociological evils, such works fail to embody the high conception of character (as Melville describes it above) and are concerned mainly with externals, or reportage.
Such is the power of Racine's poetry (it is untranslatable), his conception of character, and his penetrating analysis of it, that it suggests the presence of Sophoclean "heroic humanism".
