Word: mythicize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Charles's innovation brought waves of gospel talent into the blues field, and at the same time offered blues performers a chance to employ the climactic cadences and mythic ritual of black evangelism. Some of his more ardent followers adopted stage mannerisms in which they appeared to be seized by God; they tore off their clothes, called for witnesses, collapsed and rose up again. The bespangled James Brown's whirling, convulsive performances have even been analyzed as enactments of the Crucifixion...
Doom. And what is it? Among other things, it is a humorous evocation of the characters and the ambiance that have given baseball its mythic quality. Bernard Malamud's The Natural was a strikingly effective allegory of the baseball hero as a contemporary Sir Percival who in the end is destroyed by the myth-hungerers. Coover is less morally emphatic. He does suggest that God cannot forestall man's doom, and that man can destroy himself when he relinquishes reality for illusion...
...shooting in a seedy motel during last summer's Detroit riots hardly seems potential material for him. Yet out of these unpromising ingredients, Hersey has fashioned a book, The Algiers Motel Incident (Knopf; $5.95) that measures up to his better work. "This episode," he writes, "contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the U.S.: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by 'decent' men who deny that they are racists; the societal limbo into which so many young black men have been...
...stories that he wrote about his boyhood, he describes how "the air of that house crystallizes: our neglected teeth, our poor and starchy diet, our worn floors, our musty and haunted halls." The "genius" of his mother he wrote elsewhere, "was to give the people closest to her mythic immensity," and under her companionship, "consciousness of a special destiny made me both arrogant...
...atheism. He is convinced that it can help men live with "the cold, indifferent cosmos" by providing a form of fellowship and hope, primarily through spiritually satisfying liturgy and ritual. "The primary role of religion is priestly," Rubenstein argues. "It offers men a ritual and mythic structure in which the abiding realities of life and death can be shared...