Word: freud
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There were academic fads in 1858 and 1958 alike. In Adams's day it was "German scholarship," and Goethe. 100 years later, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" were required reading but they had become incomprehensible, indeed ridiculous. But we had Freud--in Shakespeare, in history, in the family, everywhere but in bad, (particle hours is a phrase contemporary students may never have heard: it means "never...
...droop, and grading habits relax. Try to get on the bottom of the pile.) Again, it is not that A.E.'s are vicious or ludicrous as such: but in quantity they become sheer madness. Or induce it. "The twentieth century has never recovered from the effects of Marx and Freud" (V.G.); "but whether this is a good thing or a bad is difficult to say" (A.E.). Now one such might be droll enough. But by the dozen? This, the quantitative aspect of grading--we are, after all, getting five dollars a head for you dolts and therefore pile...
...writer fond of doing the unexpected--previous works include A Clockwork Orange, a translation of Oedipus Rex and a sonata--Burgess strives for effect by interweaving the life of Freud, a sci-fi apocalypse, and Trotsky's visit to New York. Styles range from a libretto to a TV-play, at times in utter parody of themselves...
...first of the "three greatest events of our century," Freud's discovery of the unconscious, is presented much like a TV series, a splicing of Masterpiece Theater and The Roadrunner Hour. It features hordes of comic-strip Nazis goose-stepping into the life of the Freud family, the latter annoyingly over-endowed with satiric wit. Freud cuts a shabbily sympathetic figure, indulging his id with streams of forbidden cigars, lisping out lines like. "Is it my fault that I hit on it first? Did, anything prevent you from discovering psychoanalysis?", flaunting a preoccupation with incest, anality, and just about everything...
While Burgess at times lampoons Freud as much as everyone else in the story, he lauds the psychoanalyst's desire to see through the sanitized exterior of his culture to the real nature of man. The slapstick format, occasionally as predictable as the medium it parodies, spares us from excessive psychobabble, presenting instead humanity as it is, not as we would like to perceive it--with the author unmistakably siding with the former...