Word: protagonists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...strength and weakness of this striking work is that it reads like a crime novel. But its protagonist, Jay Carsey, at age 47 really was president of Charles County Community College in Maryland. And on May 19, 1982, days before commencement, he really did withdraw $28,000 from the bank, drive to the airport, mail several letters, down some vodkas and board a flight. One of the letters was a brief note of resignation. One was a short statement to his wife that he was leaving because he was a "physical and psychological disaster." A postcard, to a close friend...
Marty must have expected us to run across a Jacob Barker or two. Barker, the protagonist--if he can be called that--in Anne Bernays' Professor Romeo, is not only the epitome of slime, but he is utterly unaware of his depravity...
...possible that if Shaw had imagined his life instead of living it, he might have turned it into another best seller. As Michael Shnayerson's admirably researched and readable biography demonstrates, the story has all the elements of a good airplane read: an energetic and engaging protagonist who transcends humble Brooklyn Jewish origins to become a symbol of his generation's promise before he is 30; war years in which he serves as a member of a dashing documentary-film unit, enabling him to meet all the right people from Cairo to London and to see just enough action...
...English movies of the '80s had a team like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, David Lodge's funny, adroit Nice Work would make an ideal vehicle for them. The novel's protagonist, Vic Wilcox, is a gruff but keen-witted exec struggling to turn around a laggard steel-parts factory in Rummidge -- "an imaginary city," the author informs us, "which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world." Vic's antagonist (and here the term is literal) is Robyn Penrose, an attractive, rigorously feminist lecturer...
...movie are not without a certain sophistication. They know that the heroic, tragic and farcical modes, all of which they briefly lurch toward in the course of the film, are not really appropriate to their story. They are also aware of how rapidly the world has spun since their protagonist was burning pianos and churning up teenage hormones. Accelerated change of that sort produces the kind of broad fundamental irony that moviemakers who take themselves seriously always love. How dumb we were. And so recently. How easy it is to encourage the audience to join in a superior snicker...