Brick undertakes three tasks: to plot out the principal contradictions or polarities that structured debate and contention in American thought and the arts: to note distinguished figures - such as sociologist Erving Goffman, black modernist poet Melvin Tolson, and feminist literary critic Kate Millett - whose innovations managed to move beyond the restraints imposed by those forms of dualism; and to recognize dilemmas of the 1960s that remained unresolved.