Word: spuriousness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This novel of decay, disillusion and a spurious dolce vita attracted a wide audience of Italian readers, and won the Strega literary prize in 1961. The nominal heroine is a girl with a blonde ponytail, a little boy's face and a woman's body, who exists as a fixation of love in the narrator's past; the real heroine, however, is the blowzy city of Naples, which either "mortally wounds you or puts you to sleep." The dialogue (in better-than-average translation) has a crisp, contemporary cadence, and the writing can be perceptive and well...
...mercy of evolution, and Freud, who made man a prisoner of his instincts. According to Barzun, there are not two warring cultures, as set forth in C. P. Snow's famed thesis. The war is over and science has won. The humanities have succumbed. The spurious social sciences with their lifeless jargon dominate modern thought; the arts have become analytical and overly abstract; the common tongue is bland and depersonalized...
...narrative there is an "interim report" containing excerpts from letters, diaries, recordings, and so forth. Unfortunate- ly, the sections have titles like "Depositions, Comments, Reports, Conjectures, and Assertions Concerning the Events of the Night 19th-20th July 1944," and each statement is burdened by a great deal of spurious docmentation. The final report is effective, however, for there the content of the statements overcomes the artificiality of the technique, and the juxtaposed quotations seem a rising chorus of voices, ending in the book's central question about the nature of Germany...
...first art acquisition was a spurious Utrillo, bought at auction for $245. "I felt as though I had bought all of A.T. & T.," he recalls. When he became aware that it was a phony, he sold it fast-for $55 profit. He decided after that to gamble with undeniably authentic contemporaries. Nowadays, says Scull, "I spend Sundays prowling studios, the upper stories of fish wholesale buildings, the back alleys of Brooklyn tenements. I don't presume to know a great work of art from a so-so effort. I simply buy what I feel I want...
...These spurious threats could remain unquestioned only because so few Negroes here can even imagine a time when segregation will end. In this sense Chestertown Negroes are unprepared for integration. They are small town Americans who have never received the local benefits which city people usually think of as a compensation for the narrowness of rural life. They cannot fully understand a set of arguments which were originally designed for urban communities, where Negroes had constantly been exposed to the sort of life that true equality can provide...