In retrospect much of the highly mannered art that arose from the 1980s now looks rough and tumble, all ragged and punk-edged with out-of-context quotations of de rigueur philosophers.
An article on Feb. 24 about investigations into the campaign finances of Representative Vern Buchanan, Republican of Florida, referred incorrectly to the context of a quotation from the Federal Election Commission on improper contributions.
The immediate context of the quotation is a night ambush of the Rutulian enemy camp by two Trojan warriors, Nisus and Euryalus, whose mutual love is described in terms of classical homoerotic convention and whose deaths represent one of the epic's famously sentimental set pieces.
The president knew the full context of that quotation, but his optimism was such that he very seldom thought it necessary to explain.
The immediate context of the quotation suggests that it may be closely related to a Clementine source, the Journeys of Peter.
A further advantage is the opportunity it provides to revisit the context of the quotation within a study very easily.
And for good measure, it involves turning the politics of out-of-context quotations back on Romney (albeit to a less overtly deceitful degree).
Imagine my horror as I opened it to find our poor founding visionary -- initiator of hospitals, libraries, colleges, fire squads and unions; inventor of lightning rods and swim fins; cosmologist, epidemiologist, psychologist, philosopher, postmaster, printer -- reduced to a few out-of-context quotations.
Rather than reviewing my book, Tribe has written a common lawyer's brief, employing the sorts of tricks lawyers use to diminish a position they must attack: overreading, underreading or simply misreading complex arguments; taking snippets of quotations out of context; attributing contrived motives to an author or far-fetched consequences to a position; and so forth.
Descriptions of the study context and quotations from the interviews are provided to help the reader judge the interpretations and the transferability of the results to other settings.
