Word: metaphors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What is left when the scenery stops falling? Well, the book can be seen to be an enormous, lavender metaphor: Leonard is soul, Victor is body, opposed in unnatural self-division. The most pompous piffler since Colin Wilson takes 376 pages to plumb this irrelevancy to its wuthering depths. One vote for Mailer...
...veteran editor at The New Yorker, William Maxwell. Quoting Gertrude Stein on the absoluteness of creation, Maxwell once said: "If 'a rose is a rose is a rose,' a rose is also a rose-making machine. Cheever is a storymaking machine." To untangle the somewhat lush botanical metaphor, this means not merely that Cheever is a natural writer, who thinks best about events in the pattern of a fable, but that he himself has become his own best-realized character...
...word about professorial metaphors: the reader does not expect flowing and melodious prose in a book of this kind, but he could request Woodworth not to write sentences like "Local companies need not espouse either horn of the dilemma..." And in making a very simple point on page 96, Woodworth uses an extended metaphor which includes cores, roots, flowers, fruit, tangents, shooting stars, and satellites...
...content, that's another story. Bergman fails because he requires his audience to analyze the welter of symbols; yet being the sum of the parts, the whole film comes close to being one big metaphor. Unfortunately, this string of symbols does not form an organic work. A tank rumbles through the empty streets at no time in particular. Does it suggest the militaristic, secular power which has supplanted the absolute comfort of religion? Or perhaps it represents the phallic preoccupation of the woman who watches. Either way, its indiscriminate placement seems to reflect the work of a Waring Blender rather...
...action begins. Boy must get girl, lose girl, and get her back; or, in the metaphor of the play, the wall must be destroyed, be reconstructed, and finally be surmounted. To end the feud and crush the wall, the hire the Narrator, who is now a "Professional Abductor" known as El Gallo (he carries a card). The rape is a grand success (that is, it is a magnificent failure) and the act closes with the wall dismantled, and the families united in bliss, apparently about to live happily ever after...