Berthoff, Ann. Too Late for the Frontier. Xlibris books, 2004.
Foreward
“Now that that new century has itself turned, reflecting on the changes which have occurred in these hundred years is a commonplace: this record is meant, in part, to offer points of departure for a consideration of ‘values’ and social constraints, for thinking about the mysterious relationship of society to the vagaries of personality and about the role of Chance in human affairs” (9).
“…for once nostalgia enters, sentimentality is not far behind” (10). **Ranscha builla luscha…
“The danger of sentimentality comes from another source: as the composer of this memoir and myself a remembrancer, I have been liable to forget the tawdry and unlovely aspect of the lives and times Benton writes about and am continually tempted to romanticize. To forestall the effects of this attitude and to help some readers of the Blizzard Letters to guard against such tendencies in themselves–to imagine that all was true and beautiful in Good Morning America–I have organized the letters so that the reader is presented not with just a series of vignettes but with a kind of history” (10). ***Methodology/Method
“The best protection against either sentimental nostalgia or prejudiced accounts is to assure a variety of contexts and perspectives. In the Afterword, I have discussed the books which have served me as speculative instruments, lenses through which to scrutinize the stories Benton tells. A memoirist must strive to keep his memories and the recollections of others from becoming a theme park of the mind. He does so by inviting his readers to imagine the past; he engages the imagination of those who shared that time past and of those for whom it must be recreated” (11). **”invitation,” “imagination,” “speculative instruments.”
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