McCullers has been called sentimental, too eager to flaunt the desolate oddness of Southern homosexuals, blacks and young people.
A tale that begins with a pooch viciously stabbed with a garden fork will rarely be called sentimental.
But perhaps we want to be guided rather than shoved, and the novel's final paragraph — like the passage above — creates such a swell of nostalgia and strong-feeling that it might be called sentimental, to use Franklin's word.
"Dallas" is a redemptive tale paced at the tempo of Ron Woodroof's impatience, familiar in its shape (there are obvious similarities to "Erin Brockovich"), though it's too honest about cash to be called sentimental.
Castellani hasn't written the big, defining, Scorsese-scale novel Talese was missing — he's too fine-boned a writer, and perhaps too fond of tidy resolutions many would call sentimental — but he has elegantly captured the essence of Talese's argument.
Under a practice new to Operation Iraqi Freedom, they sorted through personal items that had been shipped with the remains to find what they call "sentimental personal effects" — watches, rings, medallions, and other items that families might want to have at the time of the funeral.
Spielberg responded to some of the criticisms of the film, stating that many of the "so called sentimental" elements of A.I., including the ending, were in fact Kubrick's and the darker elements were his own.
Call me sentimental, or call me old-fashioned, but I know who I'm rooting for.
Another element of the satire focuses on what William F. Bottiglia, author of many published works on Candide, calls the "sentimental foibles of the age" and Voltaire's attack on them.
