Word: macdonaldization
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With a socio-philosophical turn of mind and a sometimes puckish, sometimes pawkish humor, Macdonald has also shown a scholar's doggedness in sifting a stupefying quantity of material, and in separating the living wit from the dead cats flung in literary battles long ago. The parody buff will find few representative favorites missing here (J. C. Squire is one). Macdonald was uplifted by his rediscovery of The Stuffed Owl (title taken from a wonderfully woeful Wordsworth poem of the same name), an Anthology of Bad Verse published in 1930. He was dispirited by the six-volume collection...
Like Method Acting. The editor-once described as looking like a Scots Unitarian impersonating Mephistopheles-is perfectly matched to his task, and Madcap Mac is balanced by Dour Donald. Parody, he makes clear, though a laughing matter, is serious. Writes Macdonald: "I enjoy it as an intuitive kind of literary criticism, shorthand for what 'serious' critics must write out at length. It is Method Acting, since a successful parodist must live himself, imaginatively, into his parody...
...Antiquarian Thrill. Many a parody ends as a work of art in its own right, its original forgotten; the brilliant parasite fly emerges from the husk of its host. As "an antiquarian thrill," Macdonald offers the reader the original pious rhymes upon which Lewis Carroll based his verses in Alice in Wonderland. Demonstrating some sparkling footnotework, Macdonald has ranged the whole wide field of self-declared parody. He starts with Chaucer (only students of Mid. Eng. Lit. will get much of this one) and winds up with the latest chic spoof of Truman Capote based on a New York Times...
...Macdonald insists there is more parody around than the work done by those who say they are doing it, and he has enriched his study by adding odd categories, such as unconscious self-parody, and by ranging outside the official field into politics and the crypto-language of psychiatry. Antiestablishmentarian Macdonald gleefully produces a mimeographed jeu d'esprit by American Heritageman Oliver Jensen. It is a Gettysburg Address in Eisenhower, beginning: "I haven't checked these figures, but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental setup in this country...
Comic Ghoul. Max Beerbohm remains the master among the parodists, although men of greater genius (e.g., Proust, who makes an appearance in French spoofing Balzac, and William Faulkner, in a rare item, parodying himself) have worked in this deceptive motley. Why the passion for parody among writers? Macdonald finds parody inherent in a mature culture; it is a way of digesting the past. Parody obviously demands that the original parodied should be well known to the reader, and this calls for a firmly held common culture. It persists today among the British as a form of "upper-class folk...