Irony and the Discourse of Modernity

Irony and the Discourse of Modernity
Author: Ernst Behler
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2014-07-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0295801530

Behler discusses the current state of thought on modernity and postmodernity, detailing the intellectual problems to be faced and examining the positions of such central figures in the debate as Lyotard, Habermas, Rorty, and Derrida. He finds that beyond the “limits of communication,” further discussion must be carried out through irony. The historical rise of the concept of modernity is examined through discussions of the querelle des anciens et des modernes as a break with classical tradition, and on the theoretical writings of de Stael, the English romantics, and the great German romantics Schlegel, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The growth of the concept of irony from a formal rhetorical term to a mode of indirectness that comes to characterize thought and discourse generally is then examined from Plato and Socrates to Nietzsche, who avoided the term “irony” but used it in his cetnral concept of the mask.

Divine Madness

Divine Madness
Author: Lars Elleström
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2002
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780838754917

This book provides a theory that enables the concept of irony to be transferred from the literary to the visual and aural domains. Topics include the historical roots of the concept of irony as modes of oral and literary expression, and how irony relates to spatiality.

Irony and the Logic of Modernity

Irony and the Logic of Modernity
Author: Armen Avanessian
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2015-09-14
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 3110424606

The logic of modernity is an ironical logic. Modern irony, a flash of genius produced by Romantic theorists, is first discussed, e.g. in Hegel and Kierkegaard, as an ethical problem personified in figures such as the aesthete, the seducer, the flaneur, or the dandy. It fully develops in the novel, the modern genre par excellence: in novels of the early 19th century no less than in those of postmodernity or in those of the masters of citation, parody, and pastiche of classical modernism (Musil, Joyce, and Proust). This book, however, goes one step further. Looking at how such different authors as Schmitt, Kafka, and Rorty identify the political conflicts, contradictions, and paradoxes of the 20th century as ironical and offers a comprehensive account of the constitutive irony of modernity’s ethical, poetical, and political logic.

Irony's Antics

Irony's Antics
Author: Erica Weitzman
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2015
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810129833

Irony's Antics marks a major intervention into the underexplored role of the comic in German letters. At the book's heart is the relationship between the comic and irony. Weitzman argues that in the early twentieth century, irony, a key figure for the German Romantics, reemerged from its relegation to "nonsense" in a way that both rethought Romantic irony and dramatically extended its reach.

The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy

The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy
Author: Rafey Habib
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1999-06-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521624336

Study of Eliot's philosophical writings, assessing their impact on his early poetry and literary criticism.

Chic Ironic Bitterness

Chic Ironic Bitterness
Author: R. Jay Magill
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2009-12-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0472024329

A brilliant and timely reflection on irony in contemporary American culture “This book is a powerful and persuasive defense of sophisticated irony and subtle humor that contributes to the possibility of a genuine civic trust and democratic life. R. Jay Magill deserves our congratulations for a superb job!” —Cornel West, University Professor, Princeton University “A well-written, well-argued assessment of the importance of irony in contemporary American social life, along with the nature of recent misguided attacks and, happily, a deep conviction that irony is too important in our lives to succumb. The book reflects wide reading, varied experience, and real analytical prowess.” —Peter Stearns, Provost, George Mason University “Somehow, Americans—a pragmatic and colloquial lot, for the most part—are now supposed to speak the Word, without ironic embellishment, in order to rebuild the civic culture. So irony’s critics decide it has become ‘worthy of moral condemnation.’ Magill pushes back against this new conventional wisdom, eloquently defending a much livelier American sensibility than the many apologists for a somber ‘civic culture’ could ever acknowledge." —William Chaloupka, Chair and Professor, Department of Political Science, Colorado State University The events of 9/11 had many pundits on the left and right scrambling to declare an end to the Age of Irony. But six years on, we're as ironic as ever. From The Simpsons and Borat to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the ironic worldview measures out a certain cosmopolitan distance, keeping hypocrisy and threats to personal integrity at bay. Chic Ironic Bitterness is a defense of this detachment, an attitude that helps us preserve values such as authenticity, sincerity, and seriousness that might otherwise be lost in a world filled with spin, marketing, and jargon. And it is an effective counterweight to the prevailing conservative view that irony is the first step toward cynicism and the breakdown of Western culture. R. Jay Magill, Jr., is a writer and illustrator whose work has appeared in American Prospect, American Interest, Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Policy, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Print, amongother periodicals and books. A former Harvard Teaching Fellow and Executive Editor of DoubleTake, he holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hamburg in Germany. This is his first book.

The Turn of the Century

The Turn of the Century
Author: Christian Berg
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 676
Release: 1995
Genre: Modernism (Art)
ISBN: 9783110140187

Rewritten versions of contributions to an international conference held at the University of Antwerp in May 1992. Starting point for the conference was the vagueness of the very terms 'modernism' and 'modernity'. In the first section a group of comparatists address the theoretical and terminological problems of modernism. Practical readings of modernist writers; discussions of different modernist movements; and, the work of critics who have contributed to debates about modernism make up the second section. The third section looks at the problem of modernism from an interartistic and interdisciplinary perspective.

The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France
Author: Domna C. Stanton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2016-03-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317035100

In its six case studies, The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France works out a model for (early modern) gender, which is articulated in the introduction. The book comprises essays on the construction of women: three in texts by male and three by female writers, including Racine, Fénelon, Poulain de la Barre, in the first part; La Guette, La Fayette and Sévigné, in the second. These studies thus also take up different genres: satire, tragedy and treatise; memoir, novella and letter-writing. Since gender is a relational construct, each chapter considers as well specific textual and contextual representations of men. In every instance, Stanton looks for signs of conformity to-and deviations from-normative gender scripts. The Dynamics of Gender adds a new dimension to early modern French literary and cultural studies: it incorporates a dynamic (shifting) theory of gender, and it engages both contemporary critical theory and literary historical readings of primary texts and established concepts in the field. This book emphasizes the central importance of historical context and close reading from a feminist perspective, which it also interrogates as a practice. The Afterword examines some of the meanings of reading-as-a-feminist.

In Search of (Non)Sense

In Search of (Non)Sense
Author: Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2009-01-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1443803839

[…] it would seem natural to assume that the disciplines of literary studies and linguistics should by rights converge regularly to exchange views as each pursues its own goals. Is such a convergence possible on the question of sense and nonsense? James W. Underhill (this volume) The contributors to the present volume have focused their attention on two sets of problems that are leitmotifs in all the articles gathered. Firstly, should literary semantics – the linguistic study of texts/discourses marked with the feature of ‘literariness’ and ‘poeticalness’ – strive after an interpretation of all such texts at all costs? Are all literary texts interpretable? How do we cope with such troublesome linguistic phenomena as anomaly, deviance, and absurdity? Aren’t we, by any chance, fascinated by nonsense? Do we try to make it at least partly meaningful? Is interpretability our default value? The introductory article by the renowned scholar Margaret H. Freeman is an important voice, indeed a manifesto of sorts of literary semanticists in this respect. Secondly, while trying to answer all these questions, well aware of the fact that literary semantics is a fuzzy branch of linguistic studies, we have attempted at exploring its borderline zone to see to what extent we have to draw from various theoretical sources. Literary semanticists have often proved that they are capable of arguing contrastively in the atmosphere of openness to such neighbouring fields as: discourse analysis, literary pragmatics and reader-response theories, narratology, literary semiotics and hermeneutics, translation studies and – very importantly – the philosophy of language. The authors contributing to this book, an international company of regularly cooperating linguists and literary scholars, strike a nice balance between the cognitive and the more traditionally or philosophically-oriented frameworks of study, being a vivid proof that cognitive and other “denominations” are perfectly capable of fruitful coexistence. The volume ends with a short presentation by Radosław Nowakowski, already known to academic and artistic audiences in Europe as a creator and propagator of liberature – the art of unusual bookmaking, the art of the book liberated from our traditional preconceptions. We hope that our volume will be of interest to academics and students of literary theory and linguistics alike, especially those involved in literary semantics, stylistics and poetics. Naturally, the book is also addressed to members and sympathizers of IALS (International Association of Literary Semantics) and the readers of Journal of Literary Semantics, scattered across the world.

The Palgrave Handbook of German Romantic Philosophy

The Palgrave Handbook of German Romantic Philosophy
Author: Elizabeth Millán Brusslan
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 722
Release: 2020-12-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030535673

This Handbook provides a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the philosophical dimensions of German Romanticism, a movement that challenged traditional borders between philosophy, poetry, and science. With contributions from leading international scholars, the collection places the movement in its historical context by both exploring its links to German Idealism and by examining contemporary, related developments in aesthetics and scientific research. A substantial concluding section of the Handbook examines the enduring legacy of German romantic philosophy. Key Features: • Highlights the contributions of German romantic philosophy to literary criticism, irony, cinema, religion, and biology. • Emphasises the important role that women played in the movement’s formation. • Reveals the ways in which German romantic philosophy impacted developments in modernism, existentialism and critical theory in the twentieth century. • Interdisciplinary in approach with contributions from philosophers, Germanists, historians and literary scholars. Providing both broad perspectives and new insights, this Handbook is essential reading for scholars undertaking new research on German romantic philosophy as well as for advanced students requiring a thorough understanding of the subject.