Word: metaphor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...found cinematically dazzling? "Junk," he says. "A stupid story--the techinique is meaningless." Its deficiencies, he says, show up clearly when compared to Hitchcok's Psycho.. "There was a very deep psychological justification for the horror in this film," he says. "In the shower sequence, Hitchcock created a metaphor for human fear. He also conveyed cinematically the theme of the inability to relate to another person...
Admirable, but not convincing. Here Gardner side-steps the logical problem, defining love in terms of art and then repeating the same thing backwards. More often he resorts to metaphor. His metaphors are quirky, personal, often drawn from the Northeastern countryside of his youth or the Greek and Anglo-Saxon myths of his beloved Homer and Beowulf. They're catchy, too; but usually in On Moral Fiction Gardner presents us with a serious question, flings a captivating metaphor at us, and hurries away to some other problem before we have time to ask for answers...
...METAPHOR which Gardner places like a frame around his book acts in this way. On the first page he tells a story from Norse myth: Thor, Woden and the gods must fight off the trolls, the forces of chaos, but the only weapon remaining to them is Thor's hammer. For us, Gardner says, that hammer is art. Writers must take it up and strike, before the Gotterdammerung. The tale acts as a light, disarming way to begin a book with such a solemn title. But from the first pages forward Gardner relies on the logical force of this tale...
Then the sheep heard that the Council of Owls was involved in another meadow in a far off land called Aparkside, where the white sheep lived high off the hog (excuse the metaphor) by making the black sheep work really hard for them. And the white sheep wouldn't let the black sheep form a flock, and made them eat bad apples that caused many of the little lambs to die before they grew up. The Vard Council of Owls had a deal with the Aparkside rulers, in which Aparkside rulers like the John the Horsester gave Vard money...
...mellifluous brogue of Orson Welles' Michael O'Hara flows, swells and laps against the corners of this classic, covering like the South Seas (where a bored Rita Hayworth and her brilliant, embittered husband spend their money) what O'Hara himself calls the carnivorous sharks below. Shark fights serve as metaphor for the cynical, sordid goings' on between the lawyer, his berserk business partner and the aloof, gorgeous Hayworth. Welles, despite himself, gets caught up in the carnage, dragged in by unrequited adoration for Hayworth, a nose for adventure, a soul filled with romanticism and nothing particularly better...