Word: mythicize
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...Fellini's Rome is his hallucination, constructed out of studio parts on a million dollar budget. It is to be the city of his imagination, something mythic, and anything so conventional as reality is drastically out of place. So the documentary surface is mere bare-faced pretence. The film moves in a sequence of discreet setpieces--imaginative sashays from bordello to palazzo, now nostalgic, now futuristic--a self-conscious patchwork of familiar imagery in a new extravagance. Fellini is banking on the strength of his own sensibility to hold all the elements together, and the film is as interesting...
...identification of the central philosophical question in Walden the problem of free will and determinism. Men determine themselves through the mythologies they create whether the mystery of predestination or demigod at technology mystery of predestination or the damaged of technology. Thoreau says, He proceeds from there to create a mythic life this own at Walden Ponds which has written call to his neighbors, and to us, to awaken and shed the necessities we have brought upon ourselves Thoreau clearly realizes that the casting off and rebuilding of one's own life, symbolized by his retreat to the woods and construction...
Then, too, there is the reassuring presence of like-minded House members, notably "Pete" McCloskey. McCloskey, more than anyone except Riegle, is a major reference point in O Congress. With unwarranted bravado, McCloskey took his crusade against President Nixon to New Hampshire, hoping to duplicate the now mythic McCarthy venture of 1968. But the McCloskey high horse, saddled with an apathetic electorate and an empty purse, pulled up lame at the polls, dumping not Nixon but McCloskey instead. The book ends with Riegle, McCloskey, and Harvard's own Chuck Daly administering it a broken hearted coup de grace...
...traditional uses throughout this century. Novels like Malamud's The Natural, Updike's The Centaur and Joyce's Ulysses, Barth has said, are certainly admirable successes, but as far as he is concerned, they are at the wrong end of the stick. The trick is not to find the mythic elements in everyday reality but to go straight to the myths themselves to find the real people inside the heroic shells. This is Barth's method in Dunyazadiad and the other two novellas, as well Perseid and Bellerophoniad...
...Barth has grown too ambitious too fast. He is trying all at once to create new narrative forms, to engage in political satire and to tell stories. But the form is not yet ready, the satire is shrill, and the stories suffer. Chimera is an attempt to join the mythic experiments of Lost in the Funhouse with the storytelling--extravagance of The Sot-Weed Factor, and Barth himself seems not to have realized how monumental a task that...