Word: barthe
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group..." This convention was the direct response to Nazi mass murder. At the time, the 1946 resolution against genocide and the convention were viewed as vital components of an international prevention of this crime. As Allen Barth noted in 1948, this concrete stance against evil was necessary because the Holocaust was an event that "the human mind finds it difficult to remember, as it found it difficult to grasp." The resolution and convention were supposed to overcome this awe-inspired inertia by giving all nations "the legal right...
FICTION: Cannibals and Missionaries, Mary McCarthy -Collected Stories, Paul Bowles -Endless Love, Scott Spencer -Letters, John Barth -McKay's Bees, Thomas McMahon -Sophie's Choice, William Styron -The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth...
This problem might have been papered over with a vivid, engrossing surface, but Barth seems to have taken pains to make his letter writers as unattractive and self-absorbed as possible. He is one of them, thus dryly joining the ranks of the fictitious who think themselves actual, and five of the others either figure in or are suggested by his earlier books. The seventh is Lady Amherst, a fiftyish British widow who has fetched up on the Eastern Shore as a visiting lecturer at a jerk water Maryland college. As the new girl in the book, she commands initial...
...chief virtue of the old epistolary novel was suspense; the tense was present, and the letter writers did not know what would happen once they put down their quills. Barth strips the form of any forward thrust. His interest is not in progress or advancement but in recapitulation. The letters are governed by a "Deeper Pattern"; the letter writers slowly merge in the conviction that they are living the first part of their lives for a second time or, as one writes, that "biography like history may re-enact itself as farce." Stasis reigns, history is not Viconian cycles...
...takes a major writer to commit a major blunder. What Barth publishes matters, in capital Letters, and this novel will fuel brush fires in academic journals and little quarterlies for years to come. Considerations will be reconsidered, opinions re-opined. At this moment though, Barth looks like a magician who has described too fully the trip wires up his sleeve or the spare tiger dozing fitfully in a box just offstage. As he talks on and on, piling analysis upon explanation, the audience slowly files out. If Joyce's Ulysses was the milestone of modernism, Barth's Letters...