Word: lined
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
English 115--(formerly 15) Chaucer, a line-by-line course...
...Senator Minton to pasteurize their reading material for them. Taking a long breath he continued: "If, as in his attack on Rural Progress, an officer of Government can use the prestige of his position to malign, misinterpret, and deliberately undertake to cripple or destroy a magazine because not every line in it has agreed entirely with that officer, then every newspaper, every magazine, every business enterprise, every farm, every professional practice in the United States, whose operator is not a cringing yes-man, can be put at the mercy of Government officials, of any party at any time, if those...
...readers, Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night made strong reading, even in its greatly expurgated translation. But that violent and gory novel is a model of Puritan self-restraint compared with Céline's new, untranslated and probably untranslatable Trifles for a Massacre, current sensation of French literature, in which the novelist's genius for invective, hatred of modern civilization and fertility in cursing it have exploded in an anti-Semitic tirade calculated to end all anti-Semitic tirades, to make Nazis turn green with envy...
What made M. Céline an anti-Semite is explained with Gallic candor in the first 40 pages of Trifles for a Massacre. It appears that at 43, a successful novelist, War hero and practicing physician, Céline suddenly felt a great liking for dancing girls. To get acquainted with these attractive creatures he composed a ballet, filled with dancing shepherds, pure emotions, sweetness & light, and consequently much different from his usual pessimistic and obscene prose. It was rejected. Jewish musicians, actors and production managers, he decided, wanted the girls themselves. For the next 337 pages of Trifles...
When Trifles for a Massacre was published, horrified Left critics who had praised Céline's Journey to the End of the Night damned him as a Fascist. Dissenting, Novelist André Gide declared the book should be taken as a joke, although a dangerous one, being virtually a satire on the absurdity and vulgarity of genuine antiSemitism. Bystanding critics found another explanation in the detachment of modern French literature from French life, the tendency of writers like Céline to regard writing as a disinterested mental game, to be played without thought of the social values...