Word: mordant
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Between major works Jean-Luc Godard, like Graham Greene, composes entertainments. Pierrot Le Fou, made in 1965 but just released in the U.S., has little of the celebrated Godardian resonance. There are no impalements of the future, as in Alphaville or Weekend, nor is there much of the mordant social satire of La Chinoise or Les Carabineers. Godard himself feels that the film is merely "life filling the screen as a tap fills a bathtub that is simultaneously emptying at the same rate...
Eclectic Scholar. Such mordant views have made Goffman something of a maverick in his field. His work has been attacked as overspeculative, his scholarship as too eclectic; in illustrating a point, he is as likely to quote from a novel as from a sociological text. Goffman has also been accused of insulating his theories with purely supportive evidence. Then too, there may be some unexpressed envy on the part of his sociological peers about the fact that Goffman can write well; although his books have pages of jargon, they are enlightened with passages of dazzling clarity...
Brecht lived by what he always pretended to suppress: his sentiment bordering on sentimentality, the lyric-cynic play of his heart and mind, a vein of mordant humor, and his drink-drenched ability to keep one eye on the dawn and the other on the clogged gutter of life. He claimed that the greatest single influence on his prose was the Lutheran Bible, and there was something of the masked disciple of Christ in him. His Communism was basically a desire to multiply the loaves and fishes for the multitude...
...circuit. "We bring the prisoners a ray of sunshine in their dun geon," he says, "and they're not ashamed to respond." Furthermore, "they feel I'm one of their own." That is because Cash, lean and tough look ing at 36, sings with granite conviction and mordant wit about sadness, pain, loneliness and hard luck. Though he is not an ex-con himself, his empathy with jailbirds is a natural extension of the at titude expressed in his songs, that life both in and out of prison is a kind of sentence to be served...
...this unlikely premise, Romainian Gary has constructed a wildly funny, and ultimately mordant picaresque novel. The time is 20 years later, and Schatz has become police chief of a German town, though still captive straight man to Genghis Cohn's raucous spirit. "It has been my fate," says Cohn, "to add a new dimension to the legend of the Wandering Jew: that of the immanent Jew, omnipresent, entirely assimilated, forever part of each atom of the German earth, air and conscience." Night after night, he sits on Schatz's bedpost, teaching him Yiddish and the art of Jewish...