Word: metaphors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...communist thinker simply has a different kind of following now. He's the band Abba, not En Vogue. Marxism these days has appeal "in an odd sort of retro-manner," says Jedediah S. Purdy '97, an editor of Perspective who has studied Marx. "One might use the fashion metaphor that it is equivalent to showing up at a party in your '71 easy rider biker gear. It's a cachet of anachronism...
Walcott, the Nobel-winning West Indian poet whose 8,000-line Omeros hijacked Homer to the Caribbean, here packs the major events of the Odyssey into three brisk hours and still has room for his voluptuous metaphor making and severe truth telling ("What are men? Children who doubt"). After a slow start, in which stilted heroic attitudes virtually define Bad Regional Theater, Odysseus appears, in the burly, assured person of Casey Biggs, and the play takes off. Mythology can be fun when Circe is a sassy dominatrix, the Sirens are mermaids out of a Bette Midler show, and Helen...
Some of this seems to be sheer perversity, but the real shock of Sellars' production is how well it works both theatrically and thematically. The racial casting, for instance, is a brilliant way of defusing the play's anti-Semitism -- turning it into a metaphor for prejudice and materialism in all its forms. Paul Butler plays Shylock with basso-profundo self-assurance; he's a hardhearted ghetto businessman who, even when he is humiliated at the end, never loses his cool or stoops for pity...
...sort of thoughtful for a moment (sorry), I think most of these movies are presenting transvestitism as a metaphor for social difference. Because of some characteristic action of a certain group, that group is feared, shunned and ostracized by society--but at the same time, is watched with a certain fascination...
...just say that baseball--and "Baseball"--makes a great metaphor for life, and leave it at that...