Word: mordant
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Throughout, Stengel maintains a tone of cool detachment, but his epilogue contains a mordant irony: De la Rey and Bhula carry on, but on the morning of May 21, 1989, Life is stabbed to death, presumably by black men who believe the driver was "too conciliatory to the authorities." The burial occurs on a work day. "Under the state's emergency regulations, funerals like Life's cannot be held on weekends. Only a handful of people made it to the burial...
Such a reaction against impressionism was strong among younger painters of the 1880s. They were led by Georges Seurat, whose Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-86, is a manifesto of anti-impressionist aims: a hieratic, pseudoscientific, heavily theorized paean to timelessness, edged with mordant social irony about the mechanization of bourgeois life. For some it made sensuous pleasure look like an insufficient message for art. Impressionism was gaining no new adherents and losing some of its original ones: Sisley had run out of steam by the '80s, and Pissarro had gone over to the younger...
...held his own as an observer of public and private wastelands. But he has found a more authentic voice in fiction (True Confessions; Dutch Shea, Jr.; The Red White and Blue). His characters are barbed, cynical and funny. Their attitudes and remarks reveal gifts for malice, resentment and mordant sentimentality, which Dunne associates with his immigrant heritage. As he writes in Harp, a memoir that takes its title from the slang for a son or daughter of the Old Sod, "Nothing lifts the heart of the Irish caroler more than the small vice, the tiny lapse, the exposed vanity...
...idea of a summer institute for undergraduates that would promote the study of classical Western thought first arose over a year ago when Bennett was having dinner with Bloom. Bloom, a mordant critic of higher education and author of the best-selling The Closing of the American Mind, and Bennett agreed that it was time to find a new way to bring back more traditional curricula on college campuses...
Olmos was right on the wavelength of "El Pachuco," the strutting, posing, super-macho narrator and mordant conscience of the story. "I spoke in calo, street jive from the streets of East L.A. -- a mix of Spanish, English and Gypsy," he says. "They asked me if I could dance, and I hit a perfect set of splits, turning the brim of my hat as I came up." He got the part...