Word: richler
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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COCKSURE, by Mordecai Richler. Few sacred cows are left contented in this savage farce about mass culture and intellectual pretense, which turns on the proposition that the minority victimizes the majority...
COCKSURE, by Mordecai Richler. Satirist Richler's basic weapon is seductio ad absitrdum in this stylish spoof of the communications industry and pop culture...
COCKSURE, by Mordecai Richler. Satirist Richler's basic weapon is seductio ad absurdum in this stylish spoof of the communications industry and pop culture...
...Canadian boy in London who has the misfortune to be born white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant in a time when the values of disaffected minorities are on the upswing. Cocksure's premise is that the special pleadings of minority groups-Jews, Negroes, artists, homosexuals-are funny. So Richler finds humor in the way Jacob Shalinsky, messianic editor of an obscure journal called Jewish Thought, hounds Mortimer with the wily accusation that he is really a secret Jew. And he finds rich irony in the fact that a svelte Negro beauty, who craves Mortimer's body, insists...
Inversions. Richler's ploy is to turn the liberal Jewish character inside out, making Mortimer an inversion of the author's own experiences as a youth in Montreal's intensively competitive Jewish enclave. Says Richler: "Our mothers read us stories from magazines about astigmatic 14-year-olds who had already graduated from Harvard. And reading Tip Top Comics or listening to The Green Hornet on the radio was as good as asking for a whack on the head-sometimes administered with a rolledup copy of the Jewish Eagle, as if that in itself would be nourishing...