How can narrativity encode the materiality of language, the thinking goes, or perform the instability of the contemporary subject, or investigate the incapacities of signs and signifiers, if it draws from the same ancient wellspring that spawned classical myth, medieval balladry, and folksy Americana?
Families like this are hardly uncommon in the real world, but Ms. Cholodenko ("Laurel Canyon,""High Art") and Mr. Blumberg have discovered in this very modern arrangement a way of refreshing the ancient and durable wellsprings of comedy.
But their wellspring is ancient and varied: Alameddine has poached from and transformed parables from the "Panchatantra," the Old Testament, Homer, Ovid, the Koran, the uncensored "Thousand and One Nights," a collection of medieval gay poetry called "The Delight of Hearts," "Flowers From a Persian Garden" and many other sources.
"Building Big" treats civilization's giant manmade structures ancient and modern as wellsprings of history, politics, religion and psychology.
Scientists are beginning to tap into a wellspring of knowledge buried in the ancient stories of Australia's Aboriginal peoples.
Nabokov's aurochs recall those big beasts bounding across the ancient cave walls in Altamira and Lascaux — the wellsprings of human art — while the angels signal art's apotheosis.
As the tale unfolds, however, we realize that they are the wellspring of kindness and common sense, and that their ancient apartment block — lovely, crumbling, and scabbed over — is Luciano's cradle, and his only hope.
As the tale unfolds, however, we realize that they are the wellspring of kindness and common sense, and that their ancient apartment block lovely, crumbling, and scabbed over is Luciano's cradle, and his only hope.
That was especially so in provincial centers like Kostroma, an ancient city of 280,000 on the Volga River known among Russians as the wellspring of the Romanov dynasty, a city that was in decline long before the Soviet Union collapsed.
They were passed through legislative committees that are as capable of speaking about the deep wellsprings of human action as they are of speaking in ancient Aramaic.
It valued both rocks and an ancient mountain myth attached to them, including the idea that certain mountain caves were wellsprings of rejuvenating energy and even entrances to paradise.
