Word: hollow
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...free expression, the largest and most important is students [...] [who are] frequently are forbidden to voice even mild criticism of school officials or policies. In civics classes they learn of America’s heritage of freedom of expression, but in journalism classes they discover that this freedom rings hollow in the schools...
...unwritten law, all parting shots must include at least one John F. Kennedy ’40, Lawrence Summers, or T.S. Eliot ’10 quote. I’ve chosen one from the last, from “The Hollow Men.” Eliot writes, “Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow.” I am an economics major, so there is roughly a zero percent chance that I will interpret this quote correctly, but, hey, maybe this is my black swan. In my opinion...
...bright kid distracted from conversation with adults by the crazy-beautiful pictures playing in his mind. Since Pee-wee's Big Adventure, his 1985 debut feature, Burton's signature films have dwelled in the realm of arrested infancy. When he hasn't adapted children's classics (Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), he's confected his own scary, sweet bedtime fables (Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride). The typical hero of these films is a naf who stumbles into a world that threatens or baffles him and whose armor against its denizens is his innocence. Granted...
Though I only read the first section of Roth’s novel, I was immediately overwhelmed by its heavy fog of exhausted and demoralized irony. “American Pastoral” is replete with characters who lack consequential or connected outer lives, and who also lead hollow and phlegmatic inner lives. These characters are trapped in listless, “nether lives,” in which neither their exterior jobs nor their interior fantasies and dreams inspire them...
...middle-class conception of the “American Dream.” The comfortable amenities of bourgeois existence have drained the characters of meaningful “substrata” as well as worthwhile exterior vocations. While Roth successfully dramatizes how American values leave his characters trapped in hollow nether lives, all the reader is left with is an aftertaste of tired irony. None of the characters share any significant connections with other people. “American Pastoral” shows a bitter landscape of spiritual aridity in which Roth’s sardonic probing almost dehumanizes...