ellauri048.html on line 716: protagonists who are plagued by paranoid fears of persecution by other men

ellauri048.html on line 727: the construction by many male protagonists of a pseudopatriarchal family out of the remnants of male friends and male family members

ellauri106.html on line 78: In the American trilogy, the resurrected alter ego Zuckerman discovers the true identities of the protagonists of a sports idol in American Pastoral ( American Idyll, 1997), a radio star in I Married a Communist ( My Man, the Communist, 1998) and a professor emeritus in The Human Stain ( The Human Blemish, 2000) against the backdrop of changing American eras. American Pastoral was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and is considered "a remarkable example of a literary interpretation of the descent of the initially so confident [American] post-war white society into the depths of uncertainty" as a result of the Vietnam War .
ellauri106.html on line 93: Roth's protagonists are similar to each other. They are almost always male, almost always Jewish, often writers, and usually either Newark, New Jersey or the Berkshires with a few trips to Israel.
ellauri119.html on line 680: From a literary point of view her novels have little character development and are cast in black and white terms. The important things in this world are just not that easy to discern, so she is painting a child´s simple view of the world, perhaps even an autistic child´s view, who doesn´t have the capability of caring for others. Ayn Rand found early inspiration for her protagonists in a 1920´s serial killer, William Hickman and used that sociopath as the model for the heros of her novels. See: Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer
ellauri146.html on line 404: We tend not to focus on this view of Eloa as a myth of the redeeming feminine for several reasons. First, the central portion of the poem is devoted to Satan's seduction of Eloa, an activity which, for most of us, is anything but celestial. Perhaps this explains Stendhal's sarcastic description of Eloa in the Courrier anglais of 1 December 1824: "Tex-Willer-larme, devenue ange femelle, et séduite par le diable lui-même" (the ex-tear, turned into a female angel, and seduced by the devil himself). Flottes and Bonnefoy insist that the very fine psychological analysis of the seduction makes us see human protagonists in an angelic decor, which weakens any metaphysical meaning Vigny might attach to his poem. Germain, who had the benefit of Hunt's masterly work, The Epic in Ninteenth Century France (1941), states flatly that the drama of Eloa is not metaphysical but moral. Bénichou, however, does remark in Le Sacre de l'écrivain 1750-1830 (1973) that the creation of Eloa corresponds to the theological promotion of the feminine as an agent of redemption prominent in the religious sects of the Romantic period. I am sure Satan was greatly consoled by Eloa, if that's any consolation.
ellauri189.html on line 216: The male protagonists of Maria (in particular the wojewoda and his son Wacław
ellauri189.html on line 596: If one analyses the characters of the protagonists, however, one realises that Panahi is merely reinforcing ingrained, religiously patriarchal prejudices against women, who are consistently portrayed as weak, hysterical, cruel, illogical, too emotional and treacherous.
ellauri214.html on line 120: In the equally rarer chance, I might be middle eastern/Muslim, in that case, I'll either be a brainwashed fanatic, or a victim of domestic abuse. Either way, white protagonists will save me.
ellauri222.html on line 107: This notion that Bellow’s achievement as a novelist was redemptive of the form was a consistent theme in the reviews up through “Herzog.” So was the notion that his protagonists were representatives of the modern condition. After “Herzog,” those reactions largely disappeared. People stopped fretting about the death of the novel, and Bellow’s protagonists started being treated as what they always were, oddballs and cranks. But the critical reception of Bellow’s books in the first half of his career funded his reputation. It cashed out, ultimately, in the Nobel Prize. Nobels are awarded to writers who are judged to have universalized the marginal.
ellauri222.html on line 723: Saul Bellow is widely recognized as America's preeminent living novelist. His fiction, which is as intellectually demanding as it is imaginatively appealing, steadfastly affirms the value of the human soul while simultaneously recognizing the claims of community and the demoralizing inauthenticity of daily life. Refusing to give in to the pessimism and despair that threaten to overwhelm American experience, Bellow offers a persistently optimistic, though often tentative and ambiguous, alternative to postmodern alienation. In their struggle to understand their past and reorder their present, his protagonists chart a course of possibility for all who would live meaningfully in urban American society and make loads of money.
ellauri222.html on line 725: Bellow's first two novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, are brief and disciplined works, darker in mood and less intellectually complex than the later fiction but featuring protagonists who anticipate later Bellovian heroes both in their introspection and in their resistance to urban apathy. In Paris, Saul realized he need not copycat Flaubert and that instead he could write as he spoke. The result was Augie.
ellauri222.html on line 733: In their quest to find the beaver that gives meaning to life, Bellow's protagonists must also come to terms with death. The message Bellow conveys in almost all of his novels is that one must fear death to know the meaning of life and what it means to be human. Henderson overcomes his fear of death when he is buried and symbolically resurrected in the African king Dahfu's experiment. Similarly, in Seize the Day, Tommy Wilhelm confronts death in a symbolic drowning. Charlie Citrine in Humboldt's Gift echoes Whitman in viewing death as the essential question, pointing out that it is only through death that Sauls can complete the cycle of life by liberating self from the body. Bellow's meditations on death darken in Mr. Sammler's Planet and The Dean's December. While the title character in Mr. Sammler's Planet eagerly awaits the death of the person he most values in the world, Bellow contemplates the approaching death of Western culture at the hands of those who have abandoned humanistic values. The Dean's December presents an apocalyptic vision of urban decay in a Chicago totally lacking the comic touches that soften Charlie Citrone's portrait of this same city as a "moronic inferno" in Humboldt's Gift. An uncharacteristically bleak yarn from he old standup comic. With More Die of Heartbreak and the recent novellas, however, Bellow returns to his more characteristic blend of pathos and farce in contemplating the relationship between life and death. In the recent Ravelstein, Bellow once again charts this essential confrontation when Saul recounts not only his best friend's death from AIDS but also his own near-death experience from food poisoning. Through this foreground, in a fictionalized memoir to his own gay friend Allan Bloom, Bellow reveals the resilient love and tenderness that offer the modern world its saving grace.
ellauri222.html on line 759: In all of Bellow's works, an appreciation of the cultural context in which his protagonists struggle is essential to understanding these characters and their search for renewal. Bellow's vision centers almost exclusively on Jewish male experience in contemporary urban America. Proud of their heritage, his heroes are usually second-generation Jewish immigrants who seek to discover how they can live meaningfully in their American present while honoring their skinless knobs. Much of their ability to maintain their belief in humanity despite their knowledge of the world can be attributed to the affirmative nature of the Jewish culture. Bellovian heroes live in a WASP society in which they are only partially assimilated. However, as Jews have done historically, they maintain their concern for morality and community despite their cultural displacement.
ellauri222.html on line 761: Though in some ways separated from American society, Bellow's protagonists also strongly connect their identity with America. Augie begins his adventures by claiming, "I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city." Almost all of Bellow's novels take place in an American city, most often Chicago or New York. Through his depiction of urban reality, Bellow anchors his novels in the actual world, and he uses the city as his central metaphor for contemporary materialism. Although recognizing the importance of history and memory, Bellow's novels maintain a constant engagement with the present moment. His characters move in the real world, confronting sensuous images of urban chaos and clutter that often threaten to overwhelm them. Looking down on the Hudson River, Tommy Wilhelm sees "tugs with matted beards of cordage" and "the red bones of new apartments rising on the bluffs." Sammler denounces contemporary New Yorkers for the "free ways of barbarism" that they practice beneath the guise of "civilized order, property rights [and] refined technological organization." In Humboldt's Gift, which is replete with images of cannibalism and vampirism, Charlie Citrone sees Von Trenck, the source of his material success, as "the blood-scent that attracted the sharks of Chicago." Acknowledging the influence of the city on his fiction, Bellow himself has remarked, "I don't know how I could possibly separate my knowledge of life such as it is, from the city. I could no more tell you how deeply it's gotten into my bones than the lady who paints radium dials in the clock factory can tell you." However, although the city serves to identify the deterministic social pressures that threaten to destroy civilization, Bellow's heroes refuse to become its victims and instead draw on their latent nondeterministic resources of vitality to reassert their uniquely American belief in individual freedom, as well as their faith in the possibility of community.
ellauri222.html on line 763: Except for Clara Velde in A Theft, the protagonists in Bellow's novels and novellas are all male. The Bellovian hero typically seeks erotic pleasure, emotional security, and egoistic confirmation from the women in his life. In marriage, his relationships with women are conflicted, and he often retreats from his role as husband to a sensuous but selfish and demanding wife who paradoxically represents both his yearning for freewheeling sex happiness and society's pressure to relinquish the freedom so essential to his self-realization. Like his male characters who all are Saul lookalikes, Bellow's females are often interchangeable and serve roles of little dramatic import. However, although the author has come under increasing criticism for his superficial treatment of women, his depiction of women and male-female relationships serves to reinforce the psychological crisis that each male protagonist must negotiate to empty their scrotums so as to achieve peace and fulfillment.
ellauri222.html on line 765: Stylistically, Bellow's fiction reflects some of the same tensions that his protagonists seek to balance. His concern with social and personal destruction has been traced to the common run of European writers such as Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Sartre, and Camus. But Bellow's fiction also has many ties to the American literary tradition. His neotranscendentalism (what? Emersonian tomfoolery I guess), his identification with America, and the loose form of his most acclaimed novels link him most obviously to Emerson and Whitman.
ellauri263.html on line 379: But none of that gets away from it being overwhelmingly narrated from an Israeli viewpoint, focused on the Israeli protagonists. More so than in the first series, the Israeli occupation is nowhere to be seen – there’s no wall, no settlements or settlers, no house demolitions, only a few small checkpoints and none of the everyday brutalities of life under occupation. Yes, it shows that Palestinians love their mothers, but it also renders them as violent fanatics without a political cause.
ellauri263.html on line 391: Both dramas rely on protagonists entrusted with critical jobs despite routinely reckless behaviour. Both test your patience. In the case of Fauda, it’s not just the politics but also the relentless machismo; midway into the second series it feels like watching interchangeable rooms full of men in guns and distressed denim, each at some point telling a female character: “Don’t worry, I’ll get us out of here.”
ellauri264.html on line 378: Public interest in the song was renewed after the release of the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, where it plays a central role in the plot, earning the three runaway protagonists public recognition as the Soggy Bottom Boys. Soggy Bottom boys´ version is from a sorry butt.
xxx/ellauri084.html on line 830: Susan Alexandra "Sigourney" Weaver (/ s ɪ ˈ ɡ ɔːr n i /; born October 8, 1949) is an American actress. Weaver is considered to be a pioneer of action heroines in science fiction films. She is known for her role as Ellen Ripley which earned her an Academy Award nomination in 1986 and is often regarded as one of the most significant female protagonists in cinema history. Her most famous co-star was the Alien.
xxx/ellauri137.html on line 753: While the immersed-in-Japan aspect of the book was well-researched and interesting (and accurate, as far as I could tell), the mystery and romance were not so well-done. For one thing, it was hard to care about the woman who got murdered, since we only saw her once and she wasn't that nice or interesting, and it wasn't clear why the protagonist cared enough about her to go and investigate the whole thing. Maybe it was the money. In addition, cliched attempts on the protagonists life seemed unrealistic, and when we finally discovered who the murderer was, it felt more like a random pulling of a number out of a hat than the one true solution.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 606: Ernest Hemingway squirmed as his second wife, Pauline, read aloud in 1927 from Henry James' novel The Awkward Age. Hemingway wondered why James bailed his characters out of their frequent inactivity by inserting a drawing room scene; and, as he was to do frequently during the next thirty years, he freely criticized the quality of James' works, "and knowing nothing about James he seems to me to be a shit." Too, he was quick to criticize the male protagonists of James,". .and the men all without any exception talk and think like fairies except a couple of caricatures of brutal outsiders". Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway, the "brutal outsider" himself, was at this time publishing Men Without Women, whose sales had reached 15,000 in the first three months after publication. But now Hemingway, the outsider, clearly in literary ascendance, was becoming acquainted with James' works; his artistic and personal recognition of James in future years was, for the most part, to take the form of a peculiar enmity. He was often to refer to James in highly derisive terms almost to the end of his own life. Hemingway's lese majeste towards him takes the form of a sporadic obsession that reveals more about Hemingway's maturity than James' imagined frailties.
xxx/ellauri225.html on line 273: Philosophical Taoism had a large role in Le Guin´s world view, and the influence of Taoist thought can be seen in many of her stories. Many of Le Guin´s protagonists, including in The Lathe of Heaven, embody the Taoist ideal of leaving things alone. The anthropologists of the Hainish universe try not to meddle with the cultures they encounter, while one of the earliest lessons Ged learns in A Wizard of Earthsea is not to use magic unless it is absolutely necessary. Taoist influence is evident in Le Guin´s depiction of equilibrium in the world of Earthsea: the archipelago is depicted as being based on a delicate balance, which is disrupted by somebody in each of the first three novels. This includes an equilibrium between land and sea, implicit in the name "Earthsea", between people and their natural environment, and a larger cosmic equilibrium, which wizards are tasked with maintaining. Another prominent Taoist idea is the reconciliation of opposites such as light and dark, or good and evil. A number of Hainish novels, The Dispossessed prominent among them, explored such a process of reconciliation. In the Earthsea universe, it is not the dark powers, but the characters´ misunderstanding of the balance of life, that is depicted as evil, in contrast to conventional Western stories in which good and evil are in constant conflict, wearing white and black stezons, respectively. The idea of leaving good enough alone, in particular, is deeply un-American.
xxx/ellauri225.html on line 281: A number of Le Guin´s writings, including the Earthsea series, challenged the conventions of epic fantasies and myths. Many of the protagonists in Earthsea were dark-skinned individuals, in comparison to the white-skinned heroes more traditionally used; some of the antagonists, in contrast, were white-skinned, a switching of race roles that has been critically remarked upon by multiple critics. In a 2001 interview, Le Guin attributed the frequent lack of character illustrations on her book covers to her choice of non-white protagonists. LOL haha! She explained this choice, saying: "most people in the world aren't white. Why in the future would we assume they are?" Her 1985 book Always Coming Home, described as "her great experiment", included a story told from the perspective of a young protagonist, but also included poems, rough drawings of plants and animals, myths, and anthropological reports from the matriarchal society of the Kesh, a fictional people living in the Napa valley after a catastrophic global flood.
xxx/ellauri225.html on line 300: Each volume of Anals of the Western Shore also describes the coming of age of its protagonists, and features explorations of being enslaved to one´s own power. The process of growing up is depicted as seeing beyond narrow choices the protagonists are presented with by society. In Gifts, Orrec and Gry realize that the powers their people possess can be used in two ways: for control and dominion, or for healing and nurturing. Which will it be? This recognition allows them to take a third choice, viz. make like a tree and leave. This wrestling with choice has been compared to the choices the characters are forced to make in Le Guin´s short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". Similarly, Ged helps Tenar in The Tombs of Atuan to value herself and to find choices that she did not see, leading her to leave the Tombs with him. But remember, Le Guin never left Portland where her wimpy husband could barely hold a teaching job.
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