Word: metaphoric
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...final scene, where poor Tom Rakewell, insane at last, finds himself in Bedlam. The wall is covered with graffiti, each one a quotation from Hogarth, and in front of it the chorus of lunatics is housed in a stack of boxes, splayed in false perspective, a feverish metaphor of cellular confinement...
...story-of a studious imp who dresses up as a boy and contrives to marry her best friend's fiancee-into a moral tale about three victims of circumstance and prejudice. She has found in this faraway fable aspects of her own autobiography, and made Yentl a metaphor for the long struggle of womankind to emerge into the lonely splendor that is Streisand. For her male co-star she hired Mandy Patinkin, who has wrapped his crystalline Broadway tenor voice around Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, then gave him no songs to sing; all eleven are Streisand solos...
Anomaly is the stuff of history. Aristotle taught that while poetry speaks in universals, history speaks in particulars. But those who deal in historical metaphor have no interest in particulars...
Past may be prologue but it is not destiny. The central fallacy of the metaphor mongers is to assume-against history-that history repeats itself; to assume that superficially similar conditions produce identical development. Consider Iran. Ever since the fall of the Shah we have been waiting for other Irans to happen (for the other Shah to drop, as it were). There have been a variety of candidates, from Saudi Arabia to Mexico, none of which has panned out. The Great White Hope of the theory was Sadat's Egypt. Here was another autocratic, modernizing, pro-Western leader, arrogantly...
...matter: new Irans will keep popping up (in our minds) regardless. The empirical world can do little to dampen the appeal of metaphor, since it deals in what Historian Michael Oakeshott calls "practical" or "didactic history," a species of pseudo history in which what passes for analysis is the waving of icons...