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Word: artfully (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
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Usage:

Admirable, but not convincing. Here Gardner side-steps the logical problem, defining love in terms of art and then repeating the same thing backwards. More often he resorts to metaphor. His metaphors are quirky, personal, often drawn from the Northeastern countryside of his youth or the Greek and Anglo-Saxon myths of his beloved Homer and Beowulf. They're catchy, too; but usually in On Moral Fiction Gardner presents us with a serious question, flings a captivating metaphor at us, and hurries away to some other problem before we have time to ask for answers...

Author: By Scott A. Rosenberg, | Title: Muddled Morals | 5/3/1978 | See Source »

...book acts in this way. On the first page he tells a story from Norse myth: Thor, Woden and the gods must fight off the trolls, the forces of chaos, but the only weapon remaining to them is Thor's hammer. For us, Gardner says, that hammer is art. Writers must take it up and strike, before the Gotterdammerung. The tale acts as a light, disarming way to begin a book with such a solemn title. But from the first pages forward Gardner relies on the logical force of this tale and his other metaphors while we clamor...

Author: By Scott A. Rosenberg, | Title: Muddled Morals | 5/3/1978 | See Source »

...convinced that, once the alarm has been sounded, good art easily beats out bad, and that the present scarcity of first-rate art does not follow from a sickness of society but the other way around--unless, possibly, the two chase each other's tails...

Author: By Scott A. Rosenberg, | Title: Muddled Morals | 5/3/1978 | See Source »

...ignore the equivocation at the end, Gardner has taken a definite position here. But it stands unsupported, vulnerable to attacks from every angle. Can "moral art" solve economic problems? Can it solve international problems? Can it counteract the sickness in society that derives not from sick art but from sick institutions? The answers are not necessarily "no," but Gardner never bothers to give us arguments otherwise...

Author: By Scott A. Rosenberg, | Title: Muddled Morals | 5/3/1978 | See Source »

...Moral Fiction is worth reading, if only to learn what one of the finest contemporary novelists has to say about his colleagues. One can take from it these insights, a few anecdotes, and perhaps a sense of Gardner himself. But, as Gardner repeats, only art--not criticism--can embody the eternal verities, those elusive ideas of "Beauty, Truth and Goodness." On Moral Fictionfails because Gardner valiantly tries to write non-fiction about abstract concepts. But, he himself agrees, fiction alone can do justice to them...

Author: By Scott A. Rosenberg, | Title: Muddled Morals | 5/3/1978 | See Source »

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