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Word: ifs (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
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Usage:

This assault on mechanical modernism--one of Barth's correspondents describes "those symbol-fraught Swiss watches and Schwarzwald cuckoo clocks of Modernism"--hardly fits a novel that follows a schematic masterplan. You see, if you take the seven letters of the title-word "letters," superimpose them on a seven-month...

Author: By Scott A. Rosenberg, | Title: Return To Sender | 10/20/1979 | See Source »

If one imagines an artist less enamored of the world than of the language we signify it with, yet less enamored of the language than of the signifying narration, and yet less enamored of the narration than of its formal arrangement, one need not necessarily imagine that artist therefore forsaking...

Author: By Scott A. Rosenberg, | Title: Return To Sender | 10/20/1979 | See Source »

The guiding patterns of Letters are like those abstract coffee-table sculptures that come apart into little pieces, then stand whole again only as a testimony to the dogged persistence of the party guest who sat there all night putting the damn thing back together again. You can play that...

Author: By Scott A. Rosenberg, | Title: Return To Sender | 10/20/1979 | See Source »

If you still want to assay the bulk of Letters--out of a sentimental attachment to Barth's brilliant earlier epic-length efforts, Giles Goat-Boy and The Sot-Weed Factor, or out of sheer quixotic nerve--you could take the advice of Jacob Horner, formerly the protagonist of The...

Author: By Scott A. Rosenberg, | Title: Return To Sender | 10/20/1979 | See Source »

But never mind the Big Picture, which you will likely Never See; or which, if it exists at all, may be like those messages spelled out at halftime in U.S. college football matches by marching undergraduates: less intelligent, valuable, and significant than its constituent units.

Author: By Scott A. Rosenberg, | Title: Return To Sender | 10/20/1979 | See Source »

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