Word: taproots
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...around another 100 years?" he wonders. "Will the town be recognizable in 2089?" He thinks so, but he is troubled. So are all the people who still make up a rural culture of farms and small towns from the Appalachians to the Rockies, for all of our history a taproot that nourished the other branches. The crisis of the farms themselves has passed for now, but around Greenfield's town square the economic strain has worsened. A hardware store, a drugstore, a grocery store, a Ford dealership have all closed within three years. County residents are lured to the shopping...
...even though it helps betray the existentialism at the heart of Percy's fiction--the whole point of Christian existentialism was the need to believe without an external sign. the conclusion Percy provides his novel with, however, is more than a philosophical cop-out. It rips out his inspirational taproot: his refusal to explain away or excuse the psychological dilemmas of his characters. It turns out, you see, that Barrett's delusions--blown up by the author into chapters' worth of prose--are caused by an imbalance in the pH of his bloodstream, easily correctable by the addition of hydrogen...
...even though it helps betray the existentialism at the heart of Percy's fiction--the whole point of Christian existentialism was the need to believe without an external sign. the conclusion Percy provides his novel with, however, is more than a philosophical cop-out. It rips out his inspirational taproot: his refusal to explain away or excuse the psychological dilemmas of his characters. It turns out, you see, that Barrett's delusions--blown up by the author into chapters' worth of prose--are caused by an imbalance in the pH of his bloodstream, easily correctable by the addition of hydrogen...
...even though it helps betray the existentialism at the heart of Percy's fiction--the whole point of Christian existentialism was the need to believe without an external sign. the conclusion Percy provides his novel with, however, is more than a philosophical cop-out. It rips out his inspirational taproot: his refusal to explain away or excuse the psychological dilemmas of his characters. It turns out, you see, that Barrett's delusions--blown up by the author into chapters' worth of prose--are caused by an imbalance in the pH of his bloodstream, easily correctable by the addition of hydrogen...
Hyperintellectuality is the taproot of his paralysis, an acute self-consciousness and an encyclopedic, even frightening, knowledge of what has already been done in the theater and what little there is that remains to be done. Leib masterfully limns what W.J. Bate has pithily called "the burden of the past" with a virtuoso monologue in which Terry splices memorized quotations from a drama anthology while Wheeler, a translator, punctuates with footnotes. Terry declaims wildly and Wheeler answers, "Hedda Gabler--I think the Reinert translation," launching Terry into another recitation, from another play, which logically follows in the train of conversation...