Word: subjectively
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first time Bertolucci has unloaded the ideological baggage that seemed superfluous to The Conformist and Last Tango and overwhelmed 1900. Though the director's true subject has always been erotic passion, he has usually tried to obscure that fact by littering his movies with Marxist and Freudian bromides. There is no such posturing in Luna. Bertolucci deals directly with his real obsessions; his film is a lucid and uninhibited journey to the outer limits of human behavior...
...number of stories to tell is finite and dwindling; print has been rendered passe by film and electronics; realism is an irrational goal for the writer (What is real? Whose reality is it?); art rehashes art. Barth's response was to exalt artifice and make telling the subject of the tale. Giles Goat-Boy (1966) was less a novel than a treatise on the archetypes of heroism; some of the stories in Lost in the Funhouse (1968) suggested antiphonal readings between printed page and tape recorder, or struggled gamely just to get themselves started; the three novellas in Chimera...
Barth's career is germane not only because it is one of the most interesting in contemporary letters but also because it literally dictated Letters. The subject of the book, some ten years in the writing, is the body of Barth's previous fiction. Letters is a vast hall of mirrors, endlessly reflecting earlier reflections. After two decades of preparation, Barth has finally lost himself in his own funhouse...
...writers slowly merge in the conviction that they are living the first part of their lives for a second time or, as one writes, that "biography like history may re-enact itself as farce." Stasis reigns, history is not Viconian cycles or Yeatsian gyres but the thumbscrew. On this subject, the correspondents begin to correspond: "The past is a holding tank from which time's wastes recirculate . . . History really is that bird you [Barth] mention somewhere, who flies in ever diminishing circles until it disappears up its own fundament...
...make a shambles of its policies abroad. He tells for the first time how during secret negotiations in Paris in April 1970-before the U.S. invaded the North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia-he proposed that Cambodia's neutrality be guaranteed and that an international conference on the subject be convened. North Viet Nam's representative, Le Duc Tho, bluntly spurned the proposal, claiming that Hanoi expected to hold sway over all of Indochina some...