Word: cather
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...implications go far beyond the bedroom or the wedding chapel. For it is only recently, and only in America, I believe, that love has come to be seen as a social and economic soporific, a kind of Quaalude to the energies of career, politics and other achievement. And Willa Cather, I believe, was very wrong in describing what she called "that secondary social man, the lover." Rather it seems to me that the love of a single person--passionate, devoted, consuming, honoring...human--is the fuel that drives and deepens all other social passions and commitments, which connects...
Call the Constitution literature? Sarah Orne Jewett once wrote to Willa Cather, "The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper . . . it belongs to literature." One would have to say that the Constitution qualifies, human minds having been teased for centuries with the possibility of making a government that would allow that mind to realize itself. The document shows other literary attributes as well: a grounding in the ideas of its time, economy of language, orderliness, symmetrical design, a strong, arresting lead sentence. Then, there's all that...
...heart of a novel or the core of criticism. Borrowing Clauswitz's definition of war, he accuses Doctorow and Coover of using literature to wage "politics by other means." He devotes four essays to rehabilitating the reputations of James G. Cozzens, John Dos Passo Var. Wyck Brooks, and Willa Cather, all of whom be considers unjustly neglected by the prejudice of liberal critics. Cather he "rescues" from the crown of lesbianism...
When Haviaras's imagination latches on to a situation, his prose assumes a visual and descriptive brilliance not unlike that of Hardy or Cather...
...humor is helpful. "There's a strange duality," she says. "On the one hand, we're terribly proud of our Big Red, but we're also a little defensive about how big it is here. We wonder how we fit into the broader world. Willa Cather spoke of the 'clammy shiver of embarrassment' she felt in the presence of Easterners merely at the mention of the name Nebraska. We all partake in this tribal ritual of football, this coming together in the community, this need for a common identity. But we are a bit self...