Word: lifes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...course of his slim book--For Common Things runs to 207 pages--Purdy spends altogether too much time on what he openly admits are his pet issues: the miasma of confusion that is eastern European public life after 1989, and the ecological disaster of strip-mining in West Virginia. And Purdy admits, too, that his notions of the direction in which public life should move are highly derivative--although his chapter on the pervasive effects of irony and its corrosion of popular culture is original, very sophisticated, and compelling. But if you can cut through the occasional tediousness, what...
...fidelity to the tradition of American environmentalist writing in particular. Since its beginnings, American writing has been infused with the conviction that the personal must somehow stand for the nation. It is characteristic of what has been called the American Self that the particular events of the individual life are understood to somehow trend towards universality...
Perhaps this tendency of the American Self evidences itself nowhere more clearly than in environmentalist literature and eco-criticism. It wasn't narcissism but selflessness--in the most authentic sense of the term, the vanishing of the self--that led Thoreau to tell us about his life in the woods: it was his conviction that individual choices possess some kind of cosmic exemplary significance. Walden is a sort of spiritual biography of man in Nature, told through Thoreau's experience in the woods. The notion is that experience is transcendent of the personal, and indexes the general...
Drive Me Crazy, an adaptation of Todd Strasser's novel How I Created the Perfect Prom Date, is a not-so-biblical parable of high school life, a caricature of how everyone remembers high school only when they are very far away from it. You can basically figure out the entire plot of Drive Me Crazy before it even begins. Popular girl (Hart) and rebel boy (Adrian Grenier) are neighbors. Popular girl wants popular boy. Rebel boy wants rebel girl. Popular girl and rebel boy feign coupledom (Can't Buy Me Love style) to make the ones that they only...
...Life...