bathos
(en)
(noun) a literary term coined by Alexander Pope to describe to describe amusingly failed attempts at sublimity (an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous); adj is "bathetic"
The clunky bathos of this novel seems to have infected even the line-by-line prose, Updike’s great strength for almost forty years.
notable
6 years, 8 months ago