Word: fiction
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...though, in Eliot and other 20th century poets and novelists, lay in the prominence of the pronoun I--the center of relativistic thought. Thus spake the confessional poetry of the 1960s, the memoirs in the 1980s and 1990s, the prominence of the narrator in all of modern fiction. A commonplace paradox that was soon to characterize fiction was that the antihero, who was beset and disempowered by modern bureaucracies and machines, was simultaneously exalted by his diminished status...
...that tunes would suddenly disappear from music or realistic representation of the world from art or narrative cohesion from fiction. Increasingly, though, these comfortable and reassuring sources of pleasure were segregated in a popular culture that was dismissed by finer sensibilities as aesthetically retrograde. Nor was it that everything interesting in high culture had been accomplished. Brancusi's and Hemingway's pursuit of pure form, stripped of all Victorian encrustations, proceeded. And most of the isms (Dadaism, Surrealism, Absurdism) in some way derive from what we might oxymoronically call classic modernism...
...with a TV remote in its hand, hip-hop on the CD player and a computer screen in its face will do to traditional narrative. They'll speed it up, scramble it--and render it in new tonalities, using new palettes. You can see it in the way Pulp Fiction or Run Lola Run toys with time, in the down-the-rabbit-hole goofing of Being John Malkovich, in Keanu Reeves' encounter with that manic bullet in The Matrix. It's a kind of back formation from computer language, this narrative revolution manifesting itself in film. But it surely partakes...
...Patricia Highsmith and now, as incarnated by Matt Damon, a beguiling movie icon in the making. Second question: Who cares? For a start, an international coterie of readers spread across four decades. To that devoted coterie, add Anthony Minghella. "Ripley is one of the most interesting characters in postwar fiction," Minghella says, and he ought to know. The writer-director has spent three years, ever since he finished his Oscar-winning epic The English Patient, puzzling out the emotional vectors of crime fiction's most seductive sociopath...
When the truth is not enough, give us fiction. Jesus got liposuction in Price's article, in which the author removed the "fat" of faith and offered a new Gospel for a new millennium. It appears that the man who as the Son of God declared "I am the Truth" has now become the son of fiction. CHARLES CRISMIER Richmond...