Word: swiftian
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Freudian man, Marxian man, organization man, lifeman, gamesman and grey-flannel-suit man-what were they compared to the S-Man? Piglets to a python. In the diabolically clever guise of a self-help manual, The S-Man aims a good Swiftian kick at the cult and cultists of success. A British export, the book lacks the clubby good humor of Parkinson and Potter, substitutes instead the wittily barbed aphorisms of the success man's ascent ("New friends are best friends"). Cocktail party Platos will find a host of new S-Man concepts, including the Inhibition Barrier...
...discover that Gulliver (Kerwin Mathews) has a scantily clad girl friend (June Thorburn). And they may feel even worse when the hero tells her, in ponderous Jungian prose, that "the giants are inside us" and that mankind could be rescued from these vast unruly forces only by an un-Swiftian sentiment called "love...
...CHILD BUYER, by John Hersey. Not consistently on target but full of troubling truth, this satire snaps and slashes at the antihumanist trend that sees men as tools rather than souls. The Swiftian plot concerns parents, educators and politicians who acquiesce in the actual sale of a boy genius to industry...
...bestselling novel by Britain's John Braine (TIME, May 27, 1957), is a powerful, disturbing piece of cinema realism. On the face of it. the film is a social satire: a hilarious lampoon of British provincial society, an ironic study of Angry Young Manners and morals, a Swiftian extravaganza on the problems of a social climber in a society without stairs. But behind the comic mask there is the tragedy of social change, which is here expounded as the agony of moral growth, as the spiritual disaster of a young man who might be called the Julien Sorel...
...moment of truth for these characters sadly shatters the mythic mood of the play. When the bandit is revealed as a braggart, the samurai as a snuffling coward and his wife as a trollop, the Kanins' script, unlike the film, fumbles away the Swiftian savagery of Akutagawa for something close to farce. What Akutagawa intended as the subtle shadow play of appearance and reality becomes, in the wigmaker's summing up, little more than an optical illusion: "Truth is a firefly...