Word: swiftian
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...been designed reminds one of Dean Swift's A Modest Proposal, in which the satirist suggested the fattening and roasting of infants as a solution to the Irish famines. Indeed, allowing for the limits within which an artist can resemble a writer, there is something very Swiftian about the whole cast of Oldenburg's imagination - haunted by death, fascinated by the elaboration of fantasy worlds in which the uses of objects are transformed...
...Roth's manically scurrilous satire, Dixon stealthily retires to a bombproof White House locker room during a national crisis and suits up in his "Prissier College" football uniform to bolster his confidence. At times, the mimicry of Nixon's manner and cadences is brilliant. Alternating between the Swiftian and the sophomoric, Roth has Dixon assassinated by drowning in an oversized Baggie and ending up in Hell, running for the office of Devil against Satan himself...
...nation's will and soul, the flag has somehow become the symbolic rope. It takes no Swiftian eye to be astonished by what Americans are doing with ? and to ? the national banner...
Tranquil Sleep. The same unsettling effect is produced by the Swiftian irony that Goffman brings to his appraisal of the human scene. To him, a hanging is a social event, circumscribed, just like a one-day sale or a picnic, by rules calculated to make the performance go smoothly. For this reason, he says, a "table of drops" based on body weight was worked out by long experience "so that the length of the free fall would neither leave the man to wriggle nor tear off his head." The true stagecraft of a funeral, says Goffman, is found "backstage," away...
...does or he doesn't. Simpler souls may be content with noting that Tattersall has a vested interest in failure. And so does De Vries, for Hank's hegira through a series of professions allows the author to lampoon various American scenes and sideshows, sometimes with Swiftian savagery...