Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...consists, in fact, of one book--a light romantic novel, written in 1899 by one Arthur Stanwood Pier and called The Pedagogues: A Story of the Harvard Summer School. The Pedagogues has understandably failed to earn for itself a lasting place in American literature; it is an inconsequential tale about various romantic misalliances in a Summer School English composition class populated by small-town high school teachers. It has very little sweeping design or extraordinary depth or memorable character-portrayal or that sort of thing...
...both a monstrous willfulness and a monstrous absurdity to the whole affair. But no amount of contemporary psychology can controvert the evidence that here, in all its banality and glory, was a true love story. Kitty (in the metaphor of her biographer) was a magic bucket in a fairy tale. When Parnell died, she went empty. The sometime spell that had changed her from a Victorian housewife into a femme fatale was broken. All too soon she lost her powers, her odd beauty, and from time to time her sanity. After World War I she ended up back in Brighton...
...kind of analysis, this can easily be carried to dangerous extremes, but applied cautiously and selectively, it can add new dimensions to both the fiction and the reality. A dull life can be suddenly transformed through the prism of fine words and sensitive observations, or a Technicolor-surreal tale reduced to believable black and white when it is seen as a reflection of an actual incident...
...clearly shown the error of his greedy ways. Nichols tampers fatally with the format by making the heiress the one who wants to give it all away, and the two men selfish dopes who don't deserve the money but apparently get it anyway. The moral simplicity of the tale is so distorted, and its punch so diluted, that we end up disgusted with the heroes and indifferent to the outcome. Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and even Mel Brooks in his undisciplined way are intensely moral comedians; they treat comedy as much conflict between concepts of good and evil...
...story of the creation-in Genesis, insists that Adam and Eve were historical figures and believes that Noah's flood covered the entire globe since Genesis says so. Because of Jesus' reference to the story of Jonah's sojourn in "a great fish," Preus accepts the tale as fact...