Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...guise of a realist with a somewhat spooky sense of humor. The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958) appeared as slim companion pieces; they pivoted on the same philosophical question, i.e., how to impose values on a neutral universe; and both dwelt on despair as a source of grim comedy. But they were also set in a recognizable version of Maryland's Eastern Shore and populated with conventional characters. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) changed course. An encyclopedic parody of 18th century English picaresque fiction, the novel was also a comic meditation on early colonial...
Just as in the darkest days of 1932 when fate gave America its great leader F.D.R., we now have a second opportunity to elect the one man who can bring our country back from the depths of despair. It will be a tragedy if the Republicans fail to nominate-and the electorate fails to elect-John B. Connally as our next President...
...partly his own doing. His first two books came out of a writing class that he took at Harvard in the late 1940s, and his fiction has continued to radiate qualities dear to the hearts of academic critics: fractured narrative lines, surrealistic landscapes surrounded by the chiaroscuro of despair, irony, symbols galore and, most important, a self-conscious sense of being difficult. Small wonder that so much of his work has seemed to move straight from printing press to college syllabus. Yet it has never been necessary to go to school to acquire a taste for Hawkes. At its best...
...unstable word and concept whose significations and weights continually change in response to shifts in morals, social, and cultural attitudes, and even technology." But the protean term is still tempting. It seems the one word that will do to point toward something moribund in a culture, the metastasis of despair that occurs when a society loses faith in its own future, when its energy wanes and dies. It would probably be more narrowly accurate to use words like corrupt or depraved to describe, say, punk rock, or murder in a gas line, but decadent is more popular because it contains...
...back to the cities. In an attempt to stem the tide, the Shanghai government announced that no youths working on its 35 state farms would be allowed to return home for three more years. Dozens of students on two such state farms in Anhui province reportedly committed suicide in despair. Meanwhile, others have descended on China's largest city illegally. In Shanghai alone there are now an estimated 300,000 youthful returnees, along with 200,000 younger middle-school graduates who have yet to receive job assignments. After a visit to Shanghai and four other cities in eastern China...