Word: modernize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...shining example for all those unfortunates stricken with similar childhood calamities. At age 47, he is one of the most important writers in America today, published in both The New Yorker and in paperback--a rare, if dubious, achievement. Barthelme leads the so-called "comic irrealist" movement in modern fiction, which includes such lesser writers as Richard Brautigan and William Gass. But in his latest collection of short stories, Barthelme proves more adventurous than successful; stretched beyond its limits, his genre becomes tedious and inconsequential...
ANOTHER possible menace is to civil liberties. Is not the student being pried upon against his will? Privacy is indeed endangered in many areas of modern society and must be scrupulously protected, but concern for privacy cannot be absolute. Secrecy should also have its (narrowly-bounded) place. The point is the world of difference between telephone taps on an innocent individual and a professor assessing the suitablity of a student for CIA work on the basis of personal opinion and open observation. The latter hardly infringes any significant rights of privacy. The passing-on of the student's name without...
...ENDOWS HIS narrator with an urbane wit which frequently turns upon Western decadence and indicts the depersonalized world of modern technology. John's sarcastic wit carries the novel through its occasional slow stretches such as his lengthy drive from Naples to Rome...
...infuses with an inventive twist of probability theory. Civilization has grown so complex, he maintains, that it is governed only by laws of random chance. As a result, the protagonist--and the reader--is alienated from the reality he thinks he can understand and control. In the depersonalized modern world, common sense has become nearly meaningless. The effect is eerie and sobering...
...protagonist is both a product of the scientific community and an outcast from it; his cynicism seems to stem from wounded pride after he was relegated to the position of back-up astronaut. In modern technology, where remote-control computers are "the highest order, the symbol of our civilization," John says facetiously, there is no room for human failings: acute hay fever forced his demotion when a space mission unexpectedly discovered vegetation on Mars. Rather than remain a member of the backup crew, he quit, joining the undercover investigation in the hope that it would satisfy his attraction to risk...