Word: joylessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Grillet, is an object worshiper who would rather describe a love seat than a love scene; yet this is not consistently reflected in the novels of his disciples. They do have some common characteristics, notably a way of writing in flat tones of a world that is bleak arid joyless, where people lead lives hollow of meaning, sensing dimly-or failing to sense-that they are victims of existence. Very little happens; predicaments are preferred to events, and orderly progression of time, clear distinction between reality and hallucination are likely to be missing...
...baubles and goodies that customarily make their appearance at this time of year, there are few that top the Gilbert and Sullivan Players' presentations for brightness and good cheer. Time after time, these offerings melt the stony hearts of joyless CRIMSON reviewers, even those who have never been known to say a kind word about any production or performance previously. Maybe it's the Christmas ghosts finally getting to us Scrooges. More likely, it is the fact that this group puts on shows with such style and spirit that only the lastditch Savoyards could fail to be enchanted...
...Joyless Omens. As the biographer describes Joyce's literary struggles, the book's only drawback appears: Ellmann is so busy correlating Joyce's life and work that he attempts no critical revaluation. He does not ask if Finnegans Wake is a masterpiece, or a monstrous jungle of word play. Nor does he ask whether Joyce's famed "interior monologue" really reveals anything, or whether T. S. Eliot was correct when he suggested that "it doesn't tell as much as some casual glance from outside often tells...
...language Hell is the place of dreadful punishment . . . Is this how we should think of Hell?" Not at all, says Life and Death. The Bible uses the word Hell to translate the Hebrew Sheol and the Greek Hades, which were underworld places where all the dead lived shadowy, unsubstantial, joyless lives; at least at first, Sheol or Hades was not considered a place of punishment or torment. Gradually, the idea developed that there was a difference between the life of the righteous and the life of the wicked in Sheol. The part where the wicked dwelt was called Gehenna...
...characters are the kind whose gay yet joyless lives make for gossip over countless canapes, but they have rarely been described with such quiet precision or understanding. Some of them are merely foolish, some merely mistake manners for morals, and some merely hurt themselves by being themselves. But the most interesting of them come close to having no self to hurt; they are hollow at heart, capable of sensation but not of feeling...