Mary Foxe, his sort-of muse, sort-of imaginary friend since his lonely days serving in the war, arrives in Fox's study and reprimands him for being so insensitive towards his women: his writing, she says, is just downright mean.
In different ways, the work of both Donna Haraway and Luce Irigaray seeks to reveal the male privilege and domination contained within the current imaginary so that a space for a different sort of imaginary might be opened for the future.
This has been standard practice in Russian courts since at least the nineteen-thirties, when investigators would beat and cajole defendants into confessing to all sorts of imaginary crimes, such as espionage or a plot to kill Stalin.
The team saw those movies, set in a world of futuristic bikers, as a sort of antimodel: a fanciful, imaginary version of the end of the world, not the grim, all-too-convincing one that Mr. McCarthy had depicted.
Out of insanity or instinct, out of willpower or wishful thinking, Abdelkhader el-Mouaziz suddenly ignored a headwind that formed the sort of imaginary wall that mimes work against.
Remember when Russell Brand went on BBC's Newsnight two weeks ago and encouraged everyone to stop voting thus becoming a pseudo-revolutionary, leading some sort of imaginary charge?
Heavily influenced by Platos pedagogic masterpiece Critias, The Devils Guide to Hollywood is constructed as a sort of open letter to an imaginary neophyte who wishes to learn how to write scripts about blast-furnace ballerinas and cold-blooded murderers who refuse to wear underwear, even though by doing so he shall lose his very soul.
Even this early in the cycle, though, the insinuations of darkness are present ("Donna, donna, dark", "A scholar of darkness", "the negro undertaker") but throughout it all is a lewd sexuality (I set "Virgin of boorish births" as a sort of sleazy take on an imaginary Lutheran chorale).
Folk music, as used by 20th-century composers, is almost invariably some sort of imaginary concoction anyway, and for Mr. Small these folk instruments suggest both "rawness and mystical longing".
