Word: dourness
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Cain is a dour, sly farmer with qualities still highly regarded by north-countrymen :-thrift, industry, independence ("By all men I set not a fart")-who tries to cheat God in the number of wheat sheaves he offers...
...Middle Class Education, by Wilfred Sheed. A dour fictional view of Oxford in the welfare state, its collegians less likely to be lords' brats than middle-class academic grubbers, less interested in oysters and champagne than in security and pensions...
...year. England, he feels, is decaying, and the trouble is too much freedom, too little stability, widespread amorality brought on by "the great democratic mess in which there's no hierarchy, no scale of values, everything's as good-and therefore as bad-as everything else." This dour viewpoint may be valid, as cocktail-hour philosophizing goes, but its polemical exposition in the first chapter damps the chemical process that produces satire. Burgess writes comically enough about TV-induced catatonia. the god-awfulness of roast mutton, and the entanglements of adultery, but the reader feels compelled to check...
Like Method Acting. The editor-once described as looking like a Scots Unitarian impersonating Mephistopheles-is perfectly matched to his task, and Madcap Mac is balanced by Dour Donald. Parody, he makes clear, though a laughing matter, is serious. Writes Macdonald: "I enjoy it as an intuitive kind of literary criticism, shorthand for what 'serious' critics must write out at length. It is Method Acting, since a successful parodist must live himself, imaginatively, into his parody...
...Macdonald takes a dour view of the future of this comic ghoul among the arts. Life, he seems to think, is getting beyond a joke. "The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality outdistances it. What can a satirist add to the U2-Summit-Meeting fiasco? Or to the dealings between the United Nations and Premier Lumumba of the Congo Republic-the latter a character right out of Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief? Indeed, in the Congo tragicomedy, history seems to be parodying itself...