Word: myth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...strangest, least examined and most persistent of human habits is the absolute division made between East and West, Orient and Occident. Almost entirely "Western" in origin, this imaginative geography that splits the world into two unequal, fundamentally opposite spheres has brought forth more myths, more detailed ignorance and more ambitions than any other perception of difference. For centuries Europeans and Americans have spellbound themselves with Oriental mysticism, Oriental passivity, Oriental mentalities. Translated into policy, displayed as knowledge, presented as entertainment in travelers' reports, novels, paintings, music or films, this "Orientalism" has existed virtually unchanged as a kind of daydream...
Playwright Luis Valdez has tried to shape this tale as a mixture of myth, documentation and fantasy, but he never gets past the ABCs in any category. Edward James Olmos is electrifying as the embodiment of the mythic hero known as El Pachuco, but the script short-circuits him, and he is reduced to cynic snarls and stylized struts. Daniel Valdez is winning as a gang leader with unstained valor. He is stalemated in a TV-style love triangle between his loyal Chicano girlfriend (Rose Portillo) and a Jewish minority-rights defender (Karen Hensel) of inflammable zeal...
...compact" to which Bok refers in fact does not-exist. This reality may circumscribe a university's independence, but that fact underscores the importance of negotiating the reality honesty. A university guided by the myth of a "compact" really places its independence in peril...
...psychiatrists put some distance between themselves and organized medicine, identifying more with psychologists, sociologists and other social scientists than with their fellow doctors. Indeed psychiatry seemed almost ashamed of its medical origins, preferring to see itself as a softer, almost humanistic discipline. Along with this greening of psychiatry, the myth developed that it might be able to cure such serious social illnesses as drug abuse, delinquency and crime. Many psychiatrists even wondered why specialists of the human mind had to go to medical school at all. But all that has changed; now the catch phrase is, "Getting back...
HANTA YO'S value, then, does not lie in its greatness as a novel. Rather, it is important because of its authenticity, subject matter and message. But in choosing to write a novel about the Sioux, Hill has perpetrated the Plains Indian myth. She has not shown Americans the real, native American, the Indians who were the same in 1750 as they were in 1410. Instead she has only given Americans what they have idolized since they helped create him: the scalp-wielding, horse-riding savage...