She and her actors knew when to parody intellectual posing and star self-mythologizing.
"Lourdes," with its overtones both of religion and of hypocrisy and its insight into neither, is the sign of an intellectual pose that offers neither analytical thought nor emotional insight nor practical wisdom.
If, however, "rhubarb" for you is, first and foremost, baseball lingo for a bench-emptying brawl, you'll still get the point: the play is more or less an ideological free-for-all, and its opening lines mischievously foreshadow its authors' intention — to punch the lights out of every intellectual pose.
It is odd to hear a Cambridge-educated intellectual pose serious challenges to meritocracy.
"Chris is the antidote to the anti-intellectual posing that has characterized the last decade in cable news," she wrote in an e-mail.
According to friends, Clarke is also drawn to the intellectual problem posed by unconscionable crime.
The sea voyage turns into a horrific allegory of September 11th as well as a forthright vision of the threat to artistic and intellectual culture posed by terrorism, which freezes the civilized conversation of the ship's polyglot captain (John Malkovich) into the silence of Munch's mute scream.
For Steven Spielberg, the attraction of a sprawling mini-series about alien abductions was not so much the question of whether U.F.O.'s really have been grabbing humans for half a century as it was the weird, intellectual puzzle posed by the dozens of nearly identical reports.
The prodigiously clear-thinking Oxford intellectual Jeremy Wolfenden posed some disconcerting questions for Labour leaders in 1960: "How can we know that a community of equals, rather than a world of I'm-all-right-Jacks and kept-up-with-the-Joneses, is what the average free man would choose?
Instead of intellectual inquiry posed as questions, I am faced with declarative statements disguised as queries.
