Word: themes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...there is inspiration, it comes in small doses. The predominant theme is "dropping by to see how things are going." So far the players have included: Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Stokely Carmichael, Sen. Charles Percy (R-Ill.), and New York Mayor John Lindsay. The personality types tour the camp, shake hands, smile broadly, and leave. That...
...popularity on campuses where, says Notre Dame's Father James Burtchaell, it is "very relevant to the whole university atmosphere of questioning." Father Burtchaell, who conducts experimental weeknight Masses in a dormitory chapel, has all but abandoned the tradition al sermon. Instead, he begins by commenting on a theme for five minutes, then opens up the floor for discussion...
Actually, his later novels, notably Lolita and Pale Fire, are far more elaborate. Even Laughter in the Dark (originally published in 1932 as Camera obscurd), which in setting, plot and theme strongly resembles King, Queen, Knave, is more intricately patterned. But King, Queen, Knave is tricky enough-the ap-pearance-and-reality theme as applied to the eternal love triangle. In Nabokov's idiosyncratic geometry, all three angles are obtuse: Kurt Dreyer, fiftyish, owner of a prosperous department store, is suffused with a jocular egomania; Martha, his 34-year-old wife, beautiful and sybaritic, is dimmed by compulsively romantic...
Here, as in Nabokov's more sophisticated novels, an important theme is the nature of fiction itself. By putting his comic trio through a series of abstract stances-a modification of the futurist and expressionist influences that swept the arts in the '20s-he never allows the reader to forget that fiction is essentially artifice. In King, Queen, Knave, the artifice may be a little too obvious, but intelligence and wit keep it working smoothly to the end. Nabokov himself could well have been thinking of this "bright brute" when he described a certain variety of butterfly...
...work by Philip Roth commands attention. Lately, the author of Goodbye, Columbus, Letting Go and When She Was Good, one of the best of America's younger novelists, has chosen to exhibit his new fiction piecemeal in various magazines. His theme-the psychological problems of a modern Jewish-American-is not exactly new. But to judge from what has appeared so far, Roth's latest work looks like the most brilliant piece of radical humor in years...