Word: novel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...authors, however, are so novel, and in reality Slichter and Frost are reworking old themes, and doing their jobs well. Osbert Sitwell keeps up his barrage of family anecdotes; Bernard Berenson analyzes another family topic--Bernard Berenson; Beerbohm revives the Victorians; and Marquand traces his genealogy and that of New England. All is as it was--fluent, powerful in spots, and not disturbing...
...striking examples of this educational theory in practice. The first is the Institute's abandoning the Electronic Computer Project. This project was begun in 1946 by John van Neumann as an attempt to give the mathematician and physicist a high speed computer. At first the task was novel and presented many high-level problems which only a mathematician and physicist of van Neumann's maturity and brilliance could cope with. In 1952, the machine was completed, and applied physicists in various companies began to improve upon the original until the Institute decided that it was no longer part...
Most obviously, the resources of literary style and expression utilizing metaphor analogy--which may evoke not the form but the essence of a person, mood, or thing--must be abandoned; the most significant loss in the transfer from novel to film, however, is the fact that thought cannot be directly expressed. Dialogue and music, Bluestone claims, are peripheral elements; the picture dominates. Even if dialogue is accepted as an external expression of thought, once spoken it is no longer a thought. The film must compensate for this by having a very graphic plot and by nuances of acting, particularly "microphysiognomy...
...other hand, the film has a certain unity of expression that the discrete quality of language--subject, verb, object--denies to the novel. And furthermore, language cannot of course convey non-verbal experience. There are times when a picture is worth ten thousand words...
...criticism of the novels involved is both incisive and original. The films chosen are The Informer, which he classifies as a mediocre novel made into a superlative film; Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, The Grapes of Wrath and The Ox Bow Incident, excellent novels resulting in excellent films; and Madame Bovary, a classic that was butchered in adaptation...