Word: gothic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...three Episcopal bishops, is a fitting place for eccentric legacies. The campus was destroyed during the Civil War before a student ever enrolled. Afterward, churches in England donated funds to rebuild the school, and Oxford and Cambridge universities gave books for the library. The British influence is still strong. Gothic-style buildings are topped by battlements and covered with ivy. Faculty and honors students stroll along arched walkways in black academic gowns. The bell in Breslin Tower, modeled after Oxford's Magdalen, strikes each hour. The school's 10,000-acre "domain" is something of a feudal fief...
Outrage it he did, to the point of being regarded by some as a kind of Southern gothic erotomaniac. Williams dealt in taboos, yet the taboo is often the touchstone of drama: in the profoundest Greek play, a man murders his father and marries his mother. Williams mesmerized as well as outraged playgoers with Orpheus Descending (murder by blowtorch), A Streetcar Named Desire (rape, nymphomania), Summer and Smoke (frigidity), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (impotence, alcoholism, homosexuality) Sweet Bird of Youth (drug addiction, castration), Suddenly Last Summer (homosexuality, cannibalism), and The Night of the Iguana (masturbation, fetishism, coprophagy...
Tavernier (The Clockmaker; The Judge and the Assassin) has enhanced the chilling irony of Jim Thompson's Southern-gothic novel Pop. 1280 by setting it in the blazing heat of French colonial Africa circa 1938. His script, written with Jean Aurenche, has a way of sneaking brutal truths home in comic forms that range from the bon mot to the shaggy-dog story. The film is all very dislocating: the audience does not expect to see black comedy played out in bleached-white settings or to find the soul of an existential epigrammatist lurking under a rumpled bush jacket...
...sequence, while suggesting horrors, discreetly avoids trying to show the unspeakable. The score is as lush as scenery and plot. The near-perfection with which everything fits together, technically and artistically, may be what's responsible for the slight sense of distance that hangs over this trio's tortured Gothic emotions. But of course, perfection being what it is, that sense doesn't keep Sophie's Choice from delivering the emotional wallop that it carries...
...hybrid: part book, part toy. In The Dwindling Party (Random House; $8.95), Edward Gorey's gothic farce matches the designs of his kidnaping bats and boat-swallowing moats. The very young may not get some of the puns at Hickyacket Hall, but the MacFizzet family, who disappear when the readers pull various tabs, provide hours of amusement even for children who have not yet worked their...