Word: emma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...unique. Throughout history, exile has been a calamity; America turned it into a triumph and placed its immigrants in the center of a national epic. It is still symbolized by that old copper-plated cliche, the Statue of Liberty, notwithstanding the condescension and the awful poetry of the famous Emma Lazarus lines ("the wretched refuse of your teeming shore...
...novel crosscuts between Braithwaite's monologues and the fruit of his scholarly pursuits. "The Flaubert Bestiary" traces various animal metaphors and ancedotes in Flaubert's correspondence. "Emma Bovary's Eyes" uses that topic as a jumping-off point for a spirited polemic against various schools of Flaubert criticism. "Louise Colet's Version" is an imaginary reconstruction of the opinions of Louise Colet, to whom Flaubert wrote his greatest love letters, but whose replies are unfortunately lost forever. In "Braithwalie's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas," he indulges in a latter-day variant of Flaubert's favorite sport, bourgeois-bashing...
...most ferocious scorn is reserved not for novelists but for scholars. A brilliant set-piece chapter called "Emma Bovary's Eyes" takes on the late Enid Starkie, Oxford don and Flaubert biographer, who disparaged the novelist for coloring his heroine's eyes in three different hues. When the relevant passages are cited, there is no real contradiction; what Flaubert was describing was the effect of emotions on the face. Scholarly critics, fumes Braithwaite, regard the most sublime creative geniuses as "some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair who . . . was only interested in the past, and hadn't said anything...
Women, of course, did not always want to be faced with the new choices which Sanger's activities created. And Forster says that winning the vote produced complaceney. The feminist movement then needed an ideology to propel it Forster credits Emma Goldman, a Lithuanian immigrant to the United States who was active in the anarchist movement with providing this ideology According to Goldman real emancipition begins in the soul after all the outer traps have been removed, internal tyrannies still keep women in subjection...
Rorem's new oratorio, based on texts by Poe, Longfellow, Twain, Crane, Melville, Whitman, Emma Lazarus and Sidney Lanier, is one of four premieres this season for the prolific composer, and it too treads familiar ground. Best known for his art songs and his candid, elegantly written diaries recounting his life and loves in Paris, New York and elsewhere, the composer, 61, has long been a conservative voice in American music. He speaks in a basically breezy 1940s tonality, which is leavened by a few more recent technical advances. In An American Oratorio, Rorem's style works effectively with gentle...