ineffectuality

Fear of age and ineffectuality took possession of her.

However, DeLillo also manages to lend a public dimension to the writer's private paralysis and sense of ineffectuality. As Bill Gray muses to the photographer:

The ineffectuality of the American left wing is not an instance of American "exceptionalism": it is paralleled by a decline of mass-based parties all over the world.

638) suggests to Mr Roe that Wordsworth 'tacitly acknowledged the ineffectuality of his own revolutionary idealism in looking for an end to such poverty' as the Blind Beggar's.

In 1962, before the full escalation of the war, Goodman wrote a short, sharp meditation on "The Ineffectuality of Some Intelligent People" (to be found in the pamphlet, Drawing the Line).

He records his spiritual struggle over what he perceives as the ineffectuality of his efforts to improve the lives of his impoverished and misguided parishioners.

Theory proceeds in its postmortem on the avant-garde by collectivizing individual deaths into a mortuary effect--as, after a transport disaster, the specific bodies are cumulatively folded into an epitaph on "the passengers." The obtuse generality of the label "avant-garde" is not one of Mann's own devising but rather an inherited aspect of his subject, which is what the discursive economy does with each and every vanguard occasion.(7) Mann's thesis is that the avant-garde has been the traditional term for denominating resistance, insubordination, opposition, and dissent; and that by generalizing many distinct varieties of dissent under the rubric "avant-garde," this discourse has been able to categorically neutralize all of them by demonstrating the ineffectuality of any one of them.

The self-contradictory conclusion of the Divina Omnipotentia is Damian's way of bearing witness to the ineffectuality of reason in these matters.

The poem's endomorphic "Buddha" rooting enthusiastically for genocide, for example, is his own "message." The marching veterans, whose courage extends as far as glaring menacingly at uninvolved passing pedestrians, reveal their own ineffectuality and weakness so perfectly it needn't be underlined.

In Foshay's treatment, Lewis is the most Nietzschean of the modernists, rejecting the ~aestheticist ineffectuality of mere stylistic experimentation' (while remaining, we should add, amongst the most inventive members of that experimentation) and fundamentally at odds with the ~isolating individualism' and the ~depersonalizing collectivism' of bourgeois culture.