Word: sage
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...blood filled is Titus, in fact, that Yale humanistic-sage-in-residence Harold Bloom is convinced that it must be a parody of the works of Christopher Marlowe: sensationalistic, and rather less than poetic. “Shakespeare knew it was a howler,” Bloom has written, “and expected the more discerning to wallow in it self-consciously...
...Lorna Sage is known as an influential literary critic and college professor. This memoir, prompted by the death of Sage’s mother, travels through the author’s young life, attempting to make connections between the three generations of family that mold her into a woman. The book struggles, but improves as it progresses, to create a believably authentic portrait of Sage’s life...
...narrative starts with Sage as a precocious child being raised by her grandparents and mother on a vicarage in the squalid Welsh town of Hanmer. Life on the vicarage feels unrealistic as Sage paints a bitter, almost gothic picture of her grandparent’s failed marriage and the general filth that pervades the house, the town and herself. Her grandfather, the vice-ridden vicar, is an alcoholic adulterer who even has an affair with his daughter’s best friend. Emphasizing the dirt, both literal and figurative, Sage is plagued by lice. Her family refuses...
...Although Sage gives the details of vicarage life frankly and without self-pity, the narrative is too concerned with shocking the reader. The extent to which Sage exaggerates the bitterness and squalor of the household is manipulative enough to make the reader rebel and doubt the authenticity of the representation...
...University of Delaware’s decision to withdraw its invitation that she be its commencement speaker. I was sad to see how mindlessly, to be frank, students of the college I attended and for which I still feel the greatest fondness were willing to mimic all these presumably sage elders—by overstating what Doris Kearns Goodwin did in being admittedly sloppy with her sources in a minuscule part of her truly extraordinary body of work a decade and a half ago. And I was sad to witness what seems to me the students’ lack...