Word: conceits
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...claims to be happy - has some reason for finding the upside to the downturn. Mine has to do with the end of Expectation Inflation, a phenomenon that can be as corrosive to our spirits as price inflation is to our savings. Expectations are a mash-up of hope and conceit, what you've earned and what you imagine luck might hand you as a bonus for just showing up. So what did it mean that over the past generation our expectations grew so big so fast that we had effectively supersized the American Dream...
From here, Von Trier fashions a conceit from the juxtaposition of modern psychotherapy and bald psychoanalytic symbols. The couple’s respective reactions to grief—Dafoe’s intellectual distance manifest in his treatment of Gainsbourg, whose psychic pain becomes physical—exaggerate at a rate that reaches the suspenseful around the second act, and plows right through to the comically ridiculous by the third. Gainsbourg’s agonizing depression, it seems, is demonic rather than psychological—the wolf whose psychiatric sheep’s clothing leads Dafoe’s analyst...
Even the transgressive sexual dynamic that takes hold of the final chapter is hemmed in by the novel’s overtly intellectualized conceit. Pegeen’s reversion from lesbianism, rather than providing the sufficiently developed emotional component that would complicate the novel in an engaging way, merely serves to mix and match psychoanalytic tropes through progressively convoluted and prop-oriented sexual encounters. She becomes a symbol for Axler’s diminished potency, literally wearing a symbol of phallic power during their lovemaking, and his realization of that fact does little more than render it explicit...
...Jorie Graham’s poem “Europe,” the speaker wanders present-day Omaha Beach watching children make sand castles when her thoughts turn to subatomic particles. Yet she renders the scientific images in themselves, with no pretension to metaphor or conceit, even issuing a warning: “Don’t seek. It is not open to seeking.” The ambiguity of the scientific fact’s actual connection with one’s life resonates the poem into a deeper emotional plane. This is negative capability. The beauty...
...Jorge Volpi’s “Season of Ash,” translated from the Spanish by Alfred MacAdam, does indeed offer a unique scientific analysis of human behavior and a character list ample enough to facilitate countless love stories. But while Volpi’s literary conceit is ambitious enough, and his ideas occasionally intriguing, his hackneyed prose and contrived analysis diminish his message. Volpi’s account of the shocking socio-political events of the late 20th century percolates through the narrative of Yuri Chernishevsky, whose enigmatic past is gradually unmasked, revealing uncanny links...