Word: jeremiads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cruise has his best shot in a sprawling, squalling film on Hollywood's favorite serious subject. Born on the Fourth of July, directed by Oliver Stone (Platoon), is a Viet Nam melodrama pitched at high decibel level for 2 hr. 23 min. The movie is a jeremiad not just against the war but also against the cultural authorities who encouraged it from the pulpit, the blackboard, the dining-room table and the movie screen. This is an anti-Hollywood movie too; everything that was terrific in, say, Top Gun -- the war, the sex, the male bonding -- is found...
...Wolfe's jeremiad, the "puppet-masters" of the American literary scene imported a new pantheon of foreign literary gods -- Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The "headlong rush" to get rid of realism, Wolfe complains, resulted in statements like that of experimental novelist John Hawkes, "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme...
...fastidiously private about his inner life. Several important caches of the letters are still embargoed until the next century. But his spiritual autobiography, the only sort that mattered to him, is displayed throughout his poems. The Waste Land, it is now clear, is not simply an impersonal, jazz-age jeremiad. It is also a nerve- racking portrait of Eliot's emotional disintegration during his 20s: his emigration, against his family's wishes, from the U.S. to England and, once there, his disastrous marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, a vivacious but increasingly unstable partner whom Virginia Woolf once described...
...probably right. At the very least, his sober jeremiad is punctuated by numerous up-to-date examples of wretched excess: fur coats for Cabbage Patch dolls, a stretch limousine for rent in Los Angeles that boasts a hot tub and a helicopter pad, a Manhattan interior decorator who charges his clients $500 to toss throw pillows artistically around a drawing room. The customers for these esoteric goods and services spring from what Lapham calls the "equestrian class," which has multiplied impressively during the decades of postwar American prosperity and which "comprises all those who can afford to ride rather than...
...doubt the author's devotion to both literature and crusades, but Grass, 59, seems to be growing impatient with keeping the two activities separate. Witness The Rat, a novel in which imaginative extravagance is yoked to a relentless jeremiad about the despoliation of the earth. The result is a struggle between an art that teases and an argument that harangues. The loser, hands down...