Word: themes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Urban Crisis. The crisis of the American urban complex, with its rotting center-city core and its increasing demands for intelligent planning as well as financial aid, was another central theme of the Governors' talks. Said Connecticut Democrat John Dempsey: "Connecticut as a whole can be a healthy society only if we join in a concerted effort to improve the quality of urban life." He recommended a new Department of Municipal Affairs, as well as new measures to combat air-and-water pollution and discrimination in jobs and housing. And New York's Rockefeller, whose bailiwick includes...
...late Flannery O'Connor, whose death in 1964 was a severe loss to American fiction, is represented by a very long story-so long that it has been separately published as a novel. Wise Blood deals with a familiar theme: man obsessed to the point of fanaticism. The scene is the dirt-road South outside the progressive and prosperous mainstream of U.S. life. In a modern U.S. city, there is no place outside of the psychiatric ward for the hero of Wise Blood, a gaunt drifter who blinds himself the better to see God and extinguish the devil...
...Exit, a story of the first and last days of World War II, is technically no more demanding than a run-of-the-mill yarn in the old Saturday Evening Post, but the reader follows BÖll's hero willingly. Although the psychology is unsubtle and the theme not far from trite, BÖll deals in reality...
...Speak? Speak?" Death on the Installment Plan (1936) records an earlier stage in Ferdinand's life and should be nicer reading, but it is not. It is even more painful, coming as it does, closer to the heart of Céline's anguished theme: innocence violated by life. It is the story of one of the most desolate boyhoods in all fiction. The key incident comes at the end of Ferdinand's stay at an English school to which his parents had sent him. He brutally seduces the only person who had shown him affection-Nora...
William Ferguson's "Father and Son" does not explicitly reiterate the Hawkes and Kozol theme suggested by its title. Its simple diction yields no readily paraphrasable theme at all, yet the poem has a strange power. Worth seeking out, it may urge readers toward concurrence with Eliot's precept, that superior poetry can communicate much before it is wholly "understood...