Word: wordplay
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...SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE, by James Joyce, edited by Anthony Burgess. Novelist Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) has pulled Joyce's astronomical Dublin masterpiece into the general reader's field of vision simply by cutting out two-thirds of it. There is still plenty of wit and wordplay left...
...structure of the book, he explains, follows the four-cycle theory of history devised by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1774), in which human societies progress through the four stages of theocracy, aristocracy, democracy and ricorso (or recurrence). The title of the book is itself a Joycean wordplay. "Finn (fin or finis) -egan" could mean "end again," suggesting the completion of Vico's cycle, while "Wake" suggests rising from sleep, or beginning life again...
...massively evocative set, melds vaulting elegance with mute foreboding. The first person Julian meets is a butler named Butler (John Heffernan), who is not a butler. The first thing he sees is a scale model of the chateau, perfect in every exterior and interior detail. This permits clever wordplay on the ambiguity of appearance v. reality, but its blunt literalism sadly lacks the intellectual subtleties that Pirandello so often brought to the same theme. Julian meets Miss Alice (Irene Worth) and at the end of Act II is seduced by her. The seduction scene owes a discernible if unintentional debt...
...book offers help on the more recherché crimes-dacoity ("armed robbery by five or more persons") or embracery (an attempt to corrupt or influence juries). It dallies in wordplay, both criminal and legal. An Englishman kicked off his boots on the gallows to disprove his mother's prophecy that he would die in them; a British judge, asked why he dubbed a certain barrister "Necessity," answered: "Because he knows no law." It corrects popular misconceptions: Bertillon, far from creating fingerprint identifications, was skeptical of their value. It shows how greatly writers can misconceive: Conan Doyle protested that developing...
Author De Vries has rationed his wordplay in Tents and cut down on the puns and epigrams. Samples: "persona non Groton," "the Symbol Simons of literature," "What is chastity but an overemphasis on sex?" In Tents, the literary parodies are the thing, and some of them are hilariously...