Entertainment / Literature / Willing Suspension Of Disbelief: Temporarily and willingly setting aside our beliefs about reality in order to enjoy the make-believe of a play, a poem, film, or a story. Perfectly intelligent readers can enjoy tall-tales about Pecos Bill roping a whirlwind, or vampires invading a small town in Maine, or frightening alternative histories in which Hitler wins World War II, without being 'gullible' or 'childish.' To do so, however, the audience members must set aside their sense of 'what's real' for the duration of the play, or the movie, or the book. Samuel Coleridge coined the English phrase in Chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria to describe the way a reader is implicitly 'asked' to set aside his notions of reality and accept the dramatic conventions of the theater and stage or other fictional work. Coleridge writes: . . . My endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith (quoted in Cuddon, page 1044).
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Suspension Verb Synonyms: debarring, disbarment, exclusion, elimination, rejection, expulsion, ejection, eviction, deprivation, denial
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Willing Noun Synonyms: agreeable, acquiescent, compliant, amenable, consenting, assenting, passive, complaisant, docile, ready, well-disposed, happy, content, pleased, delighted, enthusiastic, avid, eager, zealous, game
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Lifestyle / Painting / Plaster Of Paris: A quick setting, pure white powder, used to set bathroom wall fixtures such as towel racks or used by craft groups for pouring molds and making plaster objects. MORE
Business / Agriculture / Plant Variety Protection Act Of 1970: P.L. 91-577 (December 24, 1970) was enacted to provide patent-like protection for new non-hybrid seed varieties. The ultimate goal was to create an incentive for public and private research on new com MORE
Health / Disease / Plague Of Justinian: (541-542) The Plague of Justinian was a pandemic that afflicted the Byzantine Empire, including its capital Constantinople, in the years 541?€“542 AD. It has been speculated that this pandemic was MORE