Word: self
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Perhaps this tendency of the American Self evidences itself nowhere more clearly than in environmentalist literature and eco-criticism. It wasn't narcissism but selflessness--in the most authentic sense of the term, the vanishing of the self--that led Thoreau to tell us about his life in the woods: it was his conviction that individual choices possess some kind of cosmic exemplary significance. Walden is a sort of spiritual biography of man in Nature, told through Thoreau's experience in the woods. The notion is that experience is transcendent of the personal, and indexes the general...
...between the necessary subjectivity of experience and the importance of nurturing a public that believes commonly in the good of environmentalism--a public that can never share the precise set of experiences that led the naturalist himself to his environmentalist beliefs--through the figure of the representative individual, not self-absorbed but rather allowing the self to absorb into the fabric of the common...
...that logic will not suffice in altering the common perception of human responsibility.The environmentalist's have believed that, ultimately, it is not logical consideration that brings people to hopeless irony, and that redemption too will be effected not through logic but through passion and commitment.The use of the exemplary self is the attempt to convince not through argument but through moral suasion: if I can act this way or believe these things, the speaker suggests, so can you. And aphorism does not necessarily proceed through channels of reason but rather through inspiring an emotional response of identification, an instinctual rather...
...strap headbands, and you've got a movie. But this movie is also a crash-course in teen angst, dealing with issues of deadbeat dads, cancer-fighting moms, weight problems and basically any other issue that can currently be seen on any late-night Lifetime movie. And, like any self-respecting teensploitation movie, the soundtrack is righteous--a noble dance version of Backstreet Boys "I Want it that Way" actually steals the show at several key party scenes. But--alas! never fear!--like any movie featuring a song by Britney Spears--you already know the ending. We all know...
Sure it's trite, sure Melissa Joan Hart might still clearly remember both the rise and fall of break-dancing, sure high-school dances do not have fifty foot television screens in the center of the dance floor. Although Drive Me Crazy does not have the light-hearted self-mocking tone of Clueless or the moody, pretentious tone of Cruel Intentions, the general theme of the movie is wonderfully formulaic. Indeed this clichd approach to high school works; the triteness of the plot renders this movie awfully comforting; everything always come out okay in the end: candied apples and lollipops...