Word: sardonicism
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The most powerful element in the story--at least after Cubism--was sex. The female nude was his obsessive subject. Everything in his pictorial universe, especially after 1920, seemed related to the naked bodies of women. Picasso imposed on them a load of feeling, ranging from dreamy eroticism (as in...
Lovers of poetry in the pre-Modernist era had been surviving on a thin diet of either Platonic idealism or a post-'90s "decadence," and it was felt that barbaric and businesslike America could not equal the sophistication of England. Eliot's vignettes of modern life (some sardonic, some elegiac...
The terrifyingly comic Adenoid Hynkel (a takeoff on Hitler), whom Chaplin played in The Great Dictator, or M. Verdoux, the sardonic mass murderer of middle-aged women, may seem drastic departures from the "little fellow," but the Tramp is always ambivalent and many-sided. Funniest when he is most afraid...
In time, society learned to balance industry and community, regulating the functions and practices of the new economy in the interests of all. It simply took the sardonic gaze of the critic to get there.
The simple double desks of the twins, and the pantomime rostrum of C.B. draw attention to how stark the set is--a draped dais surrounded by twenty telephones, with other furniture passim. Such an arrangement is hard to dislike and equally hard to fathom. Is it the device-crazed silliness...