Word: plath
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...often, literature and demographics are antithetical. In literature, personal experience supercedes objective classification, and metaphor can create its own categories; the poet Sylvia Plath can write that she "may well be a Jew." But after 20 years of the Derek Bok Plan, demographics have become our university mascot. Kevin calls the new housing system "a nightmare." If the end goal of nonordered choice is a neat breakdown of quotas, Kevin questions the methods for calculating the figures. "Who do they look for in counting diversity? They can't see diversity in an artistic community or in a Black community...
...with an adult dose of rock -- that makes most of this new group sound like Sunday choristers. Carter (part of the legendary Carter family) is a kind of roots rebel and hard to pin down, but last year's I Fell in Love was her breakthrough hit -- Sylvia Plath at the honky-tonk...
Alexander's unsubstantiated psychoanalyzing is unproductive. His constant attention to "novelistic" narrative frustrates any attempt to engage directly in Plath's experiences, which are powerful enough to speak to the reader without Alexander's amplification...
Whereas many biographers use the poet's life as background for their work, Alexander chooses to present Plath's whole existence and her body of work merely as a prelude to her death. In doing so the author seems to be responding to the cult-like obsession which has surrounded Plath's premature and tragic suicide. By contrast, when Alexander quotes a critic who maintains that The Ariel Poems are ultimately "works of great artistic purity," the reader realizes that Plath's texts need not be considered solely as an explanation of her demise...
Alexander could not quote extensively from Plath's work, as that would require cooperation of the estate. When the reader does, however, run across the poet's own words, they are always memorable. She speaks of America as the "land of milk & honey & spindryers." And when asked to comment on vital issues of the day, Plath describes herself as preoccupied with "the incalculable genetic effects of fallout...and the terrifying, mad, omnipotent marriage of big business and the military in America." The quotes effectively lure the reader back to the power of Plath's words, reminding that she was first...