Word: agonizers
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Bloom's view of literature as a ceaseless agon between challengers and titleholders is interesting and, in some instances, true. Virgil obviously had an eye on Homer when he set out to write The Aeneid, just as Dante and Milton had Virgil in their sights when they embarked upon The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. But Bloom cannot prove, on aesthetic or any other grounds, that all the writers he deems great shared the motives he ascribes to them. By the time he gets to a discussion of Emily Dickinson's poetry, he has grown so vexed at the absence...
This assertion is just as extraliterary as those set forth by feminists, multiculturalists and all the others who discuss books in ways Bloom ridicules and despises. And Bloom's view produces chapter titles such as "Freud: A Shakespearean Reading" and "Joyce's Agon with Shakespeare," in which the actual works and words of the upstart authors are wrenched out of context and forced into hypothetical bouts of cross-generational arm wrestling...
...silver or bronze, just a simple olive wreath from the sacred tree outside the Temple of Zeus in Olympia. But those leaves were the sole prize; there was no concept of place and show -- only winning. Contestants cried, "The wreath or death!" In fact, the Greek word for contest, agon, has become rather painful in English. But the rewards of victory were enormous: places of honor, money, sinecures and the admiration of nonathletes -- a word in Greek, idiotai, that has also survived in one form in English. Get thee to a gymnasium quickly...
...distinction of second place. The judges took 40 minutes to reach their decision, and announced that each of the contestants had an advocate in the deliberations. Nicole Galland, who presented LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk from Omelas"; Joseph Krailik, who chose Eliot's "Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon"; Randloph McGrorty, who delivered Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"; Philip Resnik, who recited Rilke's "Duino Elegies"; and Jeffrey Rosen, who enacted Cicero's "The Verine Orations," all deserve recognition of their oratory skills for becoming finalists in this competition. But I feel Paniela...
...this ballet a fresh-as- tomorrow look, but the choreography blends fairly closely with two other strong Robbins works now in repertory, Piano Pieces and the brief Andantino. And as always, Robbins nods to the dances of his mentor George Balanchine, particularly swift, sharply etched Rubies and the propulsive Agon. He is experimenting with a new kind of music, and how far he will go is unclear. But in the meantime he puts on a hell of a show...