Word: formlessness
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...began to compile their book about a year after returning to the United States. They never kept diaries, but simply recollected their own"individual stories for the book. As a result, this book sometimes suffers from a lack of coherence. At times, it seems to wander on like a formless series of recollections, with only arbitrary divisions between paragraphs and chapters. In this sense, An American Family in Moscow is not a book at all, but rather a loosely joined series of memoirs...
...felt the water temperature and temporarily decided against entering the pool. And when his friends invited him into the water, Luis would sputter, "no way," "no chance," and "you guys are sick." Eventually, he did go in, entering on a completely formless dive...
...strain of obscurity in fiction in the United States. The critics, academic mandarins in Bretnor's terms, have advanced the concepts of obscurity so that they alone could interpret fiction and poetry, and in turn fatten their paychecks with their reviews. Through the critics, Bretnor contends. American poetry became "formless, unreadable and unintelligible," and the short story was "devitalized into the non-story." With science fiction reaching the college campuses, Bretnor writes...
...struggle, as Clark wryly makes clear, that can be neatly schematized. The same movement, after all, encompasses Ingres, "imprisoned within his obsession with the outline," and Turner, experimenting with pure, nearly formless color. Indeed, Clark finds romanticism's unconscious beginnings in the work of the last great classicist, David, and in Goya, deaf, hating and isolated beyond the Pyrenees. As before, Clark is wonderfully deft at demonstrating the cross-pollination of ideas and more than ever willing to express his own impatience with the second-rate. Even his beloved Turner is charged with doing some "corny" paintings...
...work has admittedly had its detractors. Pepys attended three productions and termed it "a silly play" and "one of the weakest plays that ever I saw." And one of Britain's finest reviewers, Max Beerbohm, branded it "hackwork" and found it "perfunctory and formless," "tedious and frigid." For my money, it's the supreme work of its kind. And Shakespeare, having at last approached perfection, never returned to the genre again, but proceeded to deeper and darker matters...