Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...must have recently seen Demi Moore's latest movie, "Disclosure," in which a female employer sexually harasses her male employee. Mansfield's recent contention at a Faculty meeting that Harvard's sexual harassment guidelines ignore the issue of female seduction is a whimsical twist on that bit of fiction...
...MUCH EVIDENCE to the contrary, one sign suggests that the U.S. is not totally dumbing down: the continuing popularity of John le Carre's novels. He has been making best-seller lists for more than 30 years-ever since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold revolutionized espionage fiction-and he has done so with none of the typical thriller trappings. Evil geniuses do not hold the world hostage in his books; violence takes place off-page; and if there is sex, it is wistful rather than graphic, tinged with the foreknowledge that pleasure seldom lasts...
Time pressures cannot be absolutely constraining. The Friday before last, I saw quite an impressive faculty turnout (which she certainly deserved) to hear the author and creative writing instructor Jayne Anne Phillips read excerpts from her fiction. The group included such busy people as Henri Cole, Philip Fisher, and Henry Louis Gates. "Only at Harvard would you find so many faculty and students on a Friday at 5:00 p.m. for a reading," someone declared while introducing Phillips...
...book chronicles the evolution of the concept of boredom in England from the 18th century to the present, drawing its conclusions from close-readings of personal records (ie. correspondence, memoirs, diaries) and canonical works of fiction. Spacks limits her sphere of investigation to a boredom understood as "the kind that appears to be caused by not having enough to do, or not liking the things one has to do, or existing with other people or, in a setting one finds distasteful," that is, she disregards boredom as symptom of depression, anger, anxiety, or other malaise. She focuses on the upper...
Some of Spacks' most interesting observations surround boredom in women's lives and fiction. In both the 18th and 19th centuries, women's lives were defined by predictable routine. Reading offered an escape, but the dangers implicit in that escape were well known: unless novels were written in accordance with an unyieldingly moral ideology they could engender in their readers unsalutory desires and vicissitudes of emotion. Yet women's actual existence--their good works, the various musical and artistic talents with which they embellished themselves, their letter-writing and social calls--offered little fodder for fiction, except in the hands...