Word: bleakness
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...Aegean island of Samos, home of Pythagoras and Aristarchus, explaining the first stirrings of Greek scientific prowess. At another moment, he is strolling through the venerable Cavendish Laboratories of England's Cambridge University, recounting the birth of modern atomic physics. At still another, he is standing in the bleak wastes of Death Valley, discussing the efforts of the Viking landers to find living things on Mars. Alas, concedes Sagan, they have found no sure trace of life?...
...Cornell, wrote Biographer Andrew Field, "Nabokov belonged to the department of Nabokov." Just as well, considering the cheerful contempt for critical orthodoxies that resounds through these lectures. The whole historical and sociological dimension of Dickens' Bleak House, he announces, "is neither interesting nor important." He dismisses Freudian interpretations of The Metamorphosis by saying, "I am interested here in bugs, not in humbugs." As for character study in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, "the worst way to read a book is childishly to mix with the characters in it as if they were living people." Great works...
...antic platform mannerisms, this methodical tracing of specifics could be slow going. Yet it never lapses into dry exegesis. Nabokov keeps stepping back for a longer view of his subject from some surprising angle. Dickens, he insists, is anything but sentimental in his treatment of children in Bleak House. Madame Bovary, that supposed landmark of realism, he finds to be a tissue of implausibilities (although he adds that they do not matter). Above all, he continually exhorts the reader to look for his own angles, to read "not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with...
...myths continue to animate his fiction. Bradbury's work may vary with his mood, ranging from bleak to bright. But his stories rarely fail to reinforce a classic piece of American mythology: that a boy from a small Midwestern town can make it in America-without becoming an adult...
Despite that bleak figure, Hispanic immigrants continue to settle in the city, at a rate of about 600 per year, Miranda says. The report on the Hispanic population shows that most immigrants come directly to Cambridge from their native countries, but that was not the case with earlier immigrants. They arrived in New York City, and gradually filtered into Connecticut and Springfield before settling in Boston or Cambridge...