Word: metaphor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
APPLYING THE METAPHOR of seasons to the different stages in a man's life has long been a common practice for writers of the most varied sort--psychologists, novelists and playwrights through the ages have all taken up the phrase. But no one has ever gone beyond the literary use of the term to explore just what the concept of seasons in a man's life really means. Although psychologists Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget have discovered, through intensive study and observation of children, that people go through a given sequence of developmental phases in the early years of life...
...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...
...message. He places Annie Hall on the narrative content side (he considers the film cinematically inept), and Jaws on the side of good cinematic technique with trivial content. Neither bridges the gap the way Welles' Touch of Evil, superficially seen as a lurid melodrama, does, creating a broader cinematic metaphor. He gives Annie Hall a grade of B-, Jaws a D. So much for my favorite films...
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...