Word: notionalism
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...Dublin who wouldnever have had a chance to get on the musical merry-go-round watched it stop for just long enough to jump on. We were a band before we could play, and formed our band around an idea of friendship and shared spirit. That was a preposterous notion before the Ramones...
...Take for instance the key question of how agriculture spread in Europe. The genetic evidence of recent years certainly challenges the notion that agriculturalists from the Middle East wiped out previous immigrants to Europe, but it doesn't answer the question of how farming did spread. Zvelebil's reading of archaeological sites suggests that in many parts of Eastern and Northern Europe, there were porous frontiers between foragers and farmers that could last thousands of years...
...This notion of two against the world often recurs in the Japanese films that have won international acclaim. Nagisa Oshima's 1976 In the Realm of the Senses was banned and cheered for its explicit portrayal of a sadomasochistic affair; the lovers found sexual pleasure in pain, even to the point of mutilation and death...
...seppuku, the ancient samurai ritual suicide, after failing to inspire a coup d'Etat. Mishima was thoroughly steeped in the traditions of Western literature - his early work shows the imprint of Oscar Wilde and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is wholly Dostoyevskian - but he was obsessed with the notion of purifying the national character and returning Japan to its pre-Meiji era values. What is perhaps most surprising about Mishima is that his increasing political fanaticism barely tainted his artistic vision and judgment. The final novel in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, for my money his greatest work...
...represented were among my first independently arrived-at impressions of that country. What kind of nation could produce these strange-looking ships? And then, just a few decades later, distribute these wondrous plastic replicas? It has stayed with me ever since as my internal, almost subconscious response to the notion that Japan is a copycat nation: no other country, before or since, ever made aircraft carriers that looked like the Akagi or Shokaku or Hiryu. At the same time, only Japan ever made toys as wondrously byzantine as the model kits of those ships...