ellauri106.html on line 90: The rudeness is not only a source of stylistic energy, but also a fundamental moral position, an attack on the state of inhumanity disguised as niceness, as Nathan Zuckerman puts it in The Anatomy Lesson. Roth is thus directed against the social forces of obedience, prohibition and oppression, essential components of mature adulthood, which is why Posnock recognizes an “art of immaturity” in which Roth disregards cultural barriers and abandons himself completely to aesthetic pleasure, in the style of a Cervantes 'or Nabokovs .
ellauri133.html on line 872: "Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives." No wonder stones flew through her window.
ellauri270.html on line 393: The inhumanity of the villagers, which has been developed by repeated exposure to the lottery and the power of adhering to tradition, still has some arbitrary limits—they are at least relieved that a young child isn’t the one chosen. They show no remorse for Tessie, however, no matter how well-liked she might be. Even Tessie’s own children are happy to have been spared, and relieved despite their mother’s fate. Jackson builds the sense of looming horror as the story approaches its close. WTF, Tessie is clearly the odd one out, so the outcome of the lottery was fortunate!
xxx/ellauri127.html on line 124: I would argue that the first real fissure in the adulatory critical wall hailing the “literary giant” came in 1990, in George Steiner’s erudite assessment of the first volume of Brian Boyd’s Nabokov biography, “Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years.” Writing in The New Yorker, Steiner perceived, a lack of generosity of spirit in Boyd’s subject: “Nabokov’s case seems to entail a deep-lying inhumanity, or, more precisely, unhumanity,” Steiner wrote. “There is compassion in Nabokov, but it is far outweighed by lofty or morose disdain.”
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