Word: self
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...forking over $8 to see the movie a dozen times, but because it brought the adults back to animation. Not since Aladdin or the Lion King had we had indulged in a cartoon that purposely surfed right over the kiddie's heads, providing pretty eye candy for tots and self-referential fun for the big ones. While Disney went back to its melodramatic basics for its feature-length animation of the '90s, Pixar adopted a distinctly modern--practically postmodern--sensibility. Each scene in Toy Story and the even better A Bug's Life (1998) has epic ambition: to touch...
...Reader contains a wide variety of selections from West's oeuvre, with everything from a short story to television interviews to commentrary on race, politics, literature, music and sexuality. It is a book about self-discovery, and West's efforts to come to terms with himself and the world he lives in. This lofty aim is often undercut by what can be interpreted as grandiose, self serving comments, but one would find it hard to fault West or the book for his unceasing vigilance in attempting to understand himself and his surroundings. What one finds in the Reader...
...West himself addresses some of the criticisms of his work and his own misgivings, writing that "I have great suspicion of autobiographical writing. So much of it reeks of self-indulgence and self-absorption, yet any serious engagement with the world includes a questioning of one's self." But he firmly answers the question by stating that "A wholesale critical inventory of ourselves and our communities of struggle is neither self-indulgent autobiography nor self-righteous reminisence...
...postmodern frou frou, they are singularly lacking in the intellectual power that would sustain either." Horowitz moves from a questionable attack on West's intellect to a ludicrous charge of racism and anti-Semitism. He strikes at the very root of the Reader by ridiculing West's representation of self-discovery, saying "it is as though Georgie Porgie, reincarnated as a Harvard don, stuck in his thumb and pulled out this plumb: I am a Chekovian Christian." Granted, the term "Chekovian Christian" does seem a bit much, and it is used ad naseum by West. One can read the entire...
...across as muddled and abstract. However, it is on the whole a very positive book, detailing a personal struggle with the many facets of modern existence and questioning how life should be lived in the face of these obstacles. Perhaps if David Horowitz were to undergo the same critical self-examination of his own life and ideas, he would find it less appropriate to ridicule the profound expression of this struggle in The Cornel West Reader...