Word: unrealism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...child. Flip: children running from the Columbine school. Flip: refugees dragging themselves up a mountain road. Flip: Serbian mass murderers. Flip: "Trench Coat Mafia" mass murderers. Two lines of categorical hatred meet at a point before our eyes, but it is imponderable still, out of the question, unreal--all that death...
...latest work is based on a 19,000 page illustrated novel by the late recluse Henry Darger. By the time he died in 1972, Darger had produced an opus of lolli-comic girls, The Story of the Vivian Girls in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, in which Peggy and friends are chased about by storms and sundry tormenters. These girls reappear in Girls on the Run, running about with a most coherant inexplicability...
...poet Philip Larkin calls this atmosphere "the unreal life/Of exercises, marks, honor, speech days and games,/And the interesting and pretty animals that inspired it all." It's no wonder that a real animal can so unsettle us. The rare, wild beasts of the Yard remind us that there's world outside of Harvard. Beyond the classes and parties and grad-school acceptances, another life awaits. Like the skunk and hawk, we'll have to forage for our food instead of having it handed to us. But this world needn't frighten us so long as we acknowledge its existence...
...Deveria has the greatest potential for sparking the reader's interest. She is an adulteress whose husband has sent her to the ocean to "cool the passions" and forget her lover. Unfortunately, she remains underdeveloped along with the rest of the characters and only comes across as stale and unreal. Then there is the 15-year-old girl trying to cure a strange psychological malady with sea bathing. Though she becomes involved with an older man in the novel's only love scene, the description fails to be either erotic or touching...
...death-wish fantasies go, none of those is anywhere near as satisfying as our fading images of nuclear war, which had the great advantage of plausibility. By comparison, most religious versions of Armageddon (the biblical episode) seem as unreal as Armageddon (the sci-fi film). Even most devout Christians don't expect that any time soon they will see the seven-headed beast from The Revelation of St. John, the New Testament's dense and cryptic vision of the last things. But in these final days of the 20th century, religious millennialism has once again found a real world problem...