Word: ironist
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...often commenting skeptically on it. One culture was hot and angry, the other cool and comic. One was the geyser, exploding with sexuality; the other the mainstream, flowing unroiled. One was radical, the other liberal. And if the cool, liberal mainstream had a spokesman - an artist and ironist - surely that fellow was Steve Allen...
With the exception of an off-hand statement that irony is most pronounced among "media-savvy young people" who are well-educated at expensive schools, very little of the book is about Harvard. Rather, Purdy's project is much broader. The jadedly independent ironist, he argues, resists the urge to "identify strongly with any project, relationship, or aspiration" but at the same time hungers for a particular wholeness. And this is wholeness is only available through a renewed commitment to civic and political life...
...great fear of the ironist," writes Purdy, "is being caught out having staked a good part of his all on a false hope." In some sense, our earnestness for extracurricular achievement has sapped our zeal for academic and House life...
...time, this makes it harder to embrace a House we did not choose or an academic course of study that, practically speaking, means little compared to the weight of a Harvard diploma. Ignoring these hopes completely--hopes which may or may not turn out to be false--signifies the ironist's triumph...
...makes Purdy a moving and an effective narrator. That Purdy's sincerity can become overbearing, that it can devolve into sentimentalism, is acceptable collateral damage, an occupational hazard of writing from the heart. It is one of the occupational hazards of being a resentful book reviewer and a claptrap ironist, it seems, that Hodge has become unable to read from the same place...