Word: lapham
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...literature. + Impatience with such abstruse and often dogmatic theories has led to an outcry among educational traditionalists for a return to established and proven literary curriculums. Thus it is no surprise that the first wave of letters in reaction to the Harper's article, according to editor Lewis Lapham, has been strongly supportive of Wolfe's call for a return to fictional realism...
...Umberto Eco, whose latest novel, Foucault's Pendulum, is a phantasmagorical venture into the occult. "Eco," Wolfe says, "is a very good example of a writer who leads dozens of young writers into a literary cul-de-sac." Harper's plans to throw more fuel on the bonfire. Editor Lapham will devote a large part of his January issue to responses and rebuttals to Wolfe...
...Cabbage Patch dolls, a stretch limousine for rent in Los Angeles that boasts a hot tub and a helicopter pad, a Manhattan interior decorator who charges his clients $500 to toss throw pillows artistically around a drawing room. The customers for these esoteric goods and services spring from what Lapham calls the "equestrian class," which has multiplied impressively during the decades of postwar American prosperity and which "comprises all those who can afford to ride rather than walk and who can buy any or all of the baubles that constitute the proofs of social status. As with the ancient Romans...
Bashing the rich has always made for rib-tickling entertainment, and this book is no exception. Lapham effectively ridicules the widespread notion that money is omnipotent and can make everything all right: "Given the current expectations among an increasingly rich and fastidious clientele it is entirely plausible to imagine a dissatisfied traveler to Florida bringing a lawsuit against the sun." But tireless denials of the infinite efficacy of wealth ultimately cost the author his sense of humor, and he begins to manifest the mania he condemns, in looking-glass fashion. The "civil religion" of unbridled capitalism makes everything awful...
Money grubbing simply will not explain all these phenomena. False idols raise some deeper questions about the people who conceive and swear by them. Lapham understands this, but his fixation on the ruinously addling idea of riches leaves him little time for explanations or the formulation of a higher ; system of values. His diatribe eventually comes to resemble an item of the consumer culture: amusing, momentarily appealing and supererogatory...