Word: modern
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...glory rises from the fragrance of things that have been lost but cannot be forgotten. Central to its timelessness is the anachronistic world of Ada and Van's youth. Known as Antiterra, it is physically like a mixture of pastoral 19th century Russia and Canada and the modern...
Antiterra's "current events" rove timelessly between an imagined future, in which Mississippi is run entirely by Negroes, and a fabled past, in which the Crimean War, occurring in 1886, is fought with modern war planes. For a while, space and time are suspended. Ultramodern "dorophones" ring, planes fly, and magic carpets skim cool glades without so much as a patent pending...
Despite such goings-on, at Cornell Nabokov's course in Modern Fiction (also known as Dirty Lit) became famous. Nabokov detested "oldfashioned human interest criticism." It consists, he once reprovingly wrote oldfashioned, human-interest Critic Edmund Wilson, "of removing the characters from an author's imaginary world to the imaginary, but generally far less plausible, world of the critic, who then proceeds to examine these displaced characters as if they were 'real people.'" He refused to deal in such "dreadful things as trends," or offer traditional chatter about themes and schools of literature. Instead, he performed brilliant, instant autopsies...
...phrase goes, no time for religion; yet his work is infused with a poetic sense of the sanctity of all life and with the faculty of a primitive animist?vestigial in modern man ?of investing inanimate objects with life. He is inclined to deny that any utility, morality or heavy philosophical meaning should be attributed to his art. He dismisses such suggestions with the same scorn that he once made use of when a clubwoman asked him what butterflies were for. Nevertheless, certain deductions can be drawn from Nabokov's writing. In Bend Sinister, he composed a picture...
...films, is complex and unfashionable, and one of Ford's four unqualified masterpieces (How Green Was My Valley, The Searchers, Liberty Valance). The Searchers (1956) is the great epic of American film, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance its deepest statement of the lamentable transition to modern society. Donovan's Reef is one of his funniest, while putting an audience through incredible changes. Finally, the strange and wondrous 7 Women, Ford's last film and his darkest, is a chilling vision of apocalypse and the destruction of the order Ford cherished...