Word: mythic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...romance, it left something to be desired. there was none of the mythic sweep of Tristan and Isolde, not a glimmer of the mystical intensity of Heathcliff and Catherine, nothing akin to Romeo and Juliet's tragic inevitability. But the affair between Bill and Monica--if affair is the appropriate word for an "inappropriate relationship"--has something to teach us anyway, in unexpected ways...
Genre means, broadly speaking, the depiction of manners, work, morals--of men and women as social creatures. It's inherently a modest art, unlike the other model to which painters aspired when Mount was growing up: the Grand Manner, the elevated form of historical or mythic narrative, full of heroes and demigods, pagan or biblical. The trouble was that the Grand Manner was scarcely attainable in 1830s America. Not even Thomas Cole, a considerably more gifted artist than Mount, had managed to do it without bathos. Benjamin West, the prodigy from Philadelphia, had brought it off--but by going...
DIED. OCTAVIO PAZ, 84, Mexico's prolific man of letters who plumbed the mythic depths of his country's psyche in more than 40 volumes of poems and essays; of undisclosed causes; in Mexico City. Using his hybrid heritage (part Spanish, part Indian) as his starting point, Paz wrote The Labyrinth of Solitude, considered the seminal book on the Mexican mind-set. His starkly haunting metaphors of apathy and isolation made enemies among his countrymen but moved readers and, eventually, won him the Nobel Prize...
...conventions of 19th century slave narratives: "Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn Upon My Passage Through the South and Reconfigured for the Benefit of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found by Myself, Missus K.E.B. Walker, Colored, 1997." Yet our search for narrative unity is frustrated by fragmentation, as all mythic histories and fantasies are. The figures run into each other, and we can hardly determine on which of the Carpenter Center's walls the story begins...
Besides the movie's constant-laugh screenplay, its biggest asset is the performance of Jeff Bridges, who seems to have found the role of his career in the Dude. The Dude lives in small apartment in decidedly un-chic part of L.A., in the already mythic time of "the early '90s," as the film's oddly anachronistic cowboy-narrator tells us. If pressured ever so slightly, the Dude will admit that he's a bum--but it's obviously a term that he takes some pride...