Word: westernness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Gospel texts and the symbol of the cross, noting that these key-stones of Christian heritage (and consequently much of Christian liturgy) implicitly blame Jews for the events of the Gospels. Both he and Carroll traced a connection between this unavoidable implication and the history of anti-Semitism in Western and especially German culture that has more or less continuously marked two millennia of Christian tradition...
...novels of Rushdie or Morrison. Much more than style, however, the ideas expounded in the novel and the way author Jonathan Lethem structures them raise this book to its own, medium-high pedestal. At the most basic level, the novel is a literary reenactment of John Ford's 1956 Western The Searchers, which serves both as a tribute to the Great American cinematic genre of the Western and as a questioning of American notions of frontier and otherness. At another level, the book is a coming-of-age story of a girl's passage into womanhood. Finally...
Lethem's portrayal of the colony evokes the dusty, wood-ridden, disorganized towns of the Wild West glorified in the Western film genre. However, the colony also reminds us that these towns constituted an actual frontier for the colonists, a territory uncharted for them in which to institute their conception of civilization from a clean slate. The inter-actions between the Americans of the Archbuilder colony seem so elemental, summon such basic dilemmas and yield such unproductive results that the reader can only wonder why the Wild West was not indeed wilder...
Girl in Landscape thus revisits the Western film genre, offers a noteworthy character development and provides a profound, albeit tacit, discussion of language and meaning--all compensating for an overly transparent style. Maybe Lethem's next works will stray, stylistically, from the clarity that one of his epigraphs calls for, quoting none other than John Wayne: "I don't trust ambiguity." Ambiguity plagues words for Pella; perhaps it should begin to spill into Lethem's prose as well...
...moral high ground now" philosophy. Taking the stammerings of front desk receptionists for the authentic response of corporate America, Moore blames big businesses' lack of eloquence on their "indefensible position." But when a Law School student asked Moore whether what he was advocating would lead to Western Europe's inflated economic mess, Moore was only able to get out that Europe "has a lot of things that are a whole lot better than what we have" and explained that he simply believed if jobs left America, American companies wouldn't be able to sell their products anymore...