Word: tropes
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...discomfiting union of sex and mortality is a recurring trope of “The Armies.” So clogged and abortive are Ismael’s desires that his visions of the female form are as morbid as they are irresistible; between every woman’s legs is a “wild darkness,” an “infinity” to which Ismael’s eyes are always drawn. We are reminded of “King Lear,” in which the vagina is, similarly, an entry to an unknowable?...
Thus begins the actual story of “Shrew.” Bensussen manipulates this play-within-a-play trope to great success for the majority of the opening scenes. The actors take on their roles with the delightful awkwardness of children in a school play—scripts in hand, direction shouted at them mid-scene, and endearingly over-the-top line readings. Yet as the show progresses, the actors become more comfortable in their roles, and the production shifts from a clever tongue-in-cheek commentary on social performativity into a relatively normal presentation of Shakespeare?...
What's the problem? For starters, Levitt and Dubner begin their chapter on climate change by citing the concerns over the risk of global cooling, which were held briefly by some scientists in the early 1970s - that's a common trope for climate contrarians, who say that if concerns over cooling turned out to be false, maybe the same thing will come of the current worries over global warming. They go on to question the accuracy of today's climate models, and by extension, whether we should really be concerned about potentially catastrophic temperature increases over the coming century. They...
...like a life form rising from dancing nucleotides. Powers’s books have a propensity to remind the reader of their role, yet nowhere in his oeuvre does he do it so thoroughly, or effectively, as in “Generosity.” Powers manages this postmodern trope without creating an ironic distance. There is the prevailing sentiment that Powers has too much at stake to mask his work in the presumptions of irony. Far from simply instructing the reader, Powers is discovering his truths as he writes. As the book self-consciously asserts itself as a novel...
...Clare (Rachel McAdams), a young artist, and in her past - Henry's future - he has visited her and won her undying devotion. Henry, you see, has the gift or curse of time-traveling: disappearing from one temporal and spatial reality to pop up, naked, in another. This science-fiction trope will be familiar to fans of The Terminator, but Henry is no action-fantasy god. He's just a guy whose body has a wanderlust he can't harness. That's why, as he tells the besotted Clare, "I never wanted anything in my life that I couldn't stand...