Frye comes closer to our everyday understanding of the term in his discussion of the ironic persona, which is essentially a kind of literary straight man; the ironist pretends to be ignorant of everything, Frye says, even of his own irony. The classic example here is the Swift of "A Modest Proposal," who says one thing and depends on his audience to conclude the opposite.
Irony in this sense is a rhetorical strategy for suggesting things you don't want to come right out and say directly, and it's a strategy of particular use in oppressive or censorious circumstances. Irony is what keeps Hamlet going, for example -- he's the Dave Eggers of medieval Denmark. And irony was for a time the preferred and often necessary method of Eastern European writers like Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera. This is the kind of irony that was in the mind of the Hollywood movie mogul who said: "Irony is what goes over the heads of the audience.
But irony in Mr. Purdy's sense is something different -- less a way of conveying hidden meaning than of undermining meaning altogether. Irony for him is an attitude -- a bad attitude. And Mr. Purdy is right in suggesting that this particular kind of attitude has its roots in television and in the political disillusionment of the 's.
Though he doesn't say so, a telling early example of the Purdy-Eggers split manifested itself during the trial of the Chicago Eight. The Jedediahs -- Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis -- wanted a serious debate on the nature of civil disobedience; the Daves -- Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin -- wanted to make fun of the entire proceeding. Irony in this latter-day incarnation consists largely of indicating that you are in fact being ironic. It's a way of putting invisible quotation marks around speech or action, the way Willis, the terminally ironic protagonist of David Gates's novel "Preston Falls," does.
Whenever he mentions his office "colleagues," for example, he's careful to precede the word with a meaningful half-beat of hesitation. This kind of irony also relies heavily on repetition and allusion. An award-winning team of journalists, designers, and videographers who tell brand stories through Fast Company's distinctive lens. The future of innovation and technology in government for the greater good.
Leaders who are shaping the future of business in creative ways. New workplaces, new food sources, new medicine--even an entirely new economic system. Morissette famously flubbed the concept in her hit, largely singing about coincidence or bad timing rather than actual irony. Such work not only grants insight into the complexities of language—namely, the gap between literal and intended meaning—but it might teach designers and creative types a thing or two about the power of indirect messages.
If the cognitive cost for all types of irony were at least that great, we might not bother. So lately scientists have been investigating potential shortcuts we use to grasp irony before our heads start to hurt. What harsh penalties will you inflict? Here he ridicules his audience by glorifying himself: how would a mere mortal punish a god? It is as if the god said: you want to punish me, good.
In this case, he again calls what is bad good. The god has chosen an evil strategy and, as we already saw, he anyhow directly praises his own choice by calling it wise. Yet, he may as well praise himself for being able to do what he is doing without minding the consequences; in this sense, he is above the moral law and virtue.
If his way is wise, he is wise, and he is wise only if his way is wise. This is ironic in two ways, first an evil strategy and then the agent who adopts the strategy is called good. Clearly, the second irony good agent above depends on the first evil strategy. Notice that Dionysus is a god in human guise, and thus some of his actions may look human, too.
He is a thoroughly ambiguous character in the play. Therefore, he fails to rise above ethics, and then it is easy to see that the context is ironic in a situational sense, too.
Why explain and insist if you are so mighty? The boastful god speaks in the free ironic mode when he looks so strong , but at the same time the context looks ironic in the situational sense when the god looks so needy and weak.
Let us now look more closely into the second type of irony, namely, situational irony, or irony that we find embedded in a given situation. When Dionysus calls his choices wise, he aggrandizes himself. Then he explains and justifies his strategy and by doing so degrades himself by behaving as if he were human; in the case of a god this should not happen, and this entails irony in the situational sense.
The god desires what is in itself worthless, I mean human acts are worthless as they are but also desirable, which entails that bad is good. Therefore, the situational case is deeply ironic. Think of two different examples, first hypocrisy and second miserliness.
A hypocritical person applies different standards to himself loose and to others strict , and this entails situational irony in the following way. A miser is bad as he refuses to share any of his wealth and yet he considers his attitude customary and justified, and in this sense good. Not to recognize irony has its own ironic overtones.
Next, let us discuss the free case and, more specifically, the notions like distance, detachment, estrangement, and social, personal, and self-alienation. The standard idea is that irony entails some distance between the speaker and the subject matter. Indeed, distance is an essential element in ironic speech, but what do we mean by this? It means I do not take the subject matter seriously when I utilize an ironic marker and call a thing something it is not.
And the sentence displaying an ironic marker must be ceteris paribus false; it also is known to be false by the speaker and, conditionally, by her intended audience.
Suppose I do not want to deceive my audience; I call A B, and I know that B is not the case, I do not take my approach to A seriously, and yet I invite my audience to follow me. If I am serious about A, in an epistemological sense, I would not call A something it is not, B; moreover, I would expect the audience to know or come to know that this is the case.
In the normative sense, I do not even pretend that A is B, that is, bad is good, which is to say that I do care what A actually is. However, I make it explicit that I do not value or want it. I happen to own two bad paintings, a Churchill and a Hitler. I am sentimentally attached to C but not to H. I am too close to it. Of course, I can distance myself from C, which requires a special reason, and then I may ironize C, too.
However, in this case my irony may seem misplaced and dishonest, I mean, if I really love my Churchill. The audience can no longer simply trust what the speaker says because he means something else than what he says, or his speech act has a covert meaning. The audience must then ask, quietly, what the speaker could possibly mean if he does not mean what he says: he mentions a blind man as a seer.
They cannot be sure, they hesitate, except in the case of some blunt and conventionally formulated ironic expressions. Why does he introduce an ironic marker that looks like a metaphor?
Such a question announces a communicative gap that opens up between the speaker and the audience, and it will take some time and effort to close it. The audience will turn away if the cost that is associated with the initial suspension of belief and the consequent effort to close the communicative gap appears excessive.
These are then the risks of free irony: first, the speaker loses his touch with the subject matter as it is invalid truth claim ; second, she flirts with what is bad normative pseudo-acceptance of it ; and third, she compromises her audience social cost. Of course, some cases of irony are conventional and based on idiosyncratic social constructions; think about some free irony that only a racist audience understands and appreciates.
How is all this epistemology and ethics related to the situational cases of irony? In a situational case, we experience less distancing. I may see irony in a social situation, but I still think it as bad. When I see a hypocrite in action, I may notice exactly what she is, a bad person, and I also say , without irony, that she is bad.
This entails no distancing; yet, the irony of the case prevails because the case itself is indeed ironic. When I see the case as ironic in the situational sense, I may still condemn it, which entails no distancing.
I say she is bad even when I see the irony of her actions, that is, their illusory goodness from her own point of view. Hence, in a situational case distancing may be minimal. What can we say about this? Free irony knowingly celebrates its own falsehoods and false acceptances.
This creates a comedy and entails distancing. Situational cases, on the contrary, are comic only in the sense that they are available to celebration in terms of free irony, which entails minimal distancing.
Certain situations are deliberately and freely construed by the speaker to appear in ironic light. In those cases, the bad aspect of the object must be recognized and acknowledged. One can ironize almost anything, if one wants to. Some cases, however, are such that they suggest themselves to be discussed in terms of free irony.
Say, a pompous but bad pianist pretends to be good and believes he is good; the case may be so impressive that its toxicity invites celebration by means of free irony and its false statements. In fact, such toxic cases are examples of situational irony that one makes explicit. But this is not always the case.
Which one is the primary type of irony, is it the free or the situational case? I already hinted at the primacy of the situational case, for the following reason.
We regularly face fake, weird, and anomalous situations in social life, such that the arrangements of their atomic component parts create mutually disharmonious or toxic social molecules.
As we see them, such situations are indeed toxic. My very reading of the case feels contaminated and thus I should do something about it.
The case is, say, embarrassing and I may not want to get involved, but I may compensate for this uncertainty by means of free irony that releases the accumulated tension. What looks toxic, I call good, and if my intended audience agrees, I am happy. But, as I said above, free irony may not be based on situational irony. The case is not toxic, it is innocent. The basic psycho-linguistic fact of situational irony concerns what we mimic when we formulate an utterance we may classify as grounded free irony.
The more toxic the case, the more strongly we reject it, and hence the distance will be proportionally greater. If the rejection is too strong, we cannot talk about irony anymore, or the fear, horror, and disgust brought about the case blocks any attempt to ironize it.
Grounded free irony works only when the cases are moderately toxic. Again, if the degree of toxicity is too low, irony is not called for as the case is not interesting as such, irony has no bite, and one must use other linguistic tropes or stay silent about it.
Therefore, let us only deal with those moderate cases. We read their properties, we recognize their toxicity, but we do not like what we see, we reject it, we distance ourselves from it, and we look back at it without participating in any way. Then we call them good, considering it as a comedy with a dark twist, and that is all we achieved in this case.
Certainly, to witness toxic incongruities is painful or at least disturbing and confusing. And thus the rejection of the toxic contents creates distance and ultimately feeling of alienation, when the irony of the case, in the situational sense, becomes too obvious. Again, is it not strange that one denies the comedy of war and then ironizes it, and by doing so recreate the comedy?
Such warlike cases illustrate and explain the idea of distancing that is regularly involved in irony. At the same time, these examples provide us an idea of the length of the distance that is directly proportional to the strength of rejection, which in its turn is based on the subjective evaluation of the toxicity of the situation and its description.
We can see how situational irony turns from something that is bad per se into something that is pretentiously said to be good. Irony works like that: what is bad, that is logically faulty, linguistically incongruous, epistemically dubious, socially strange, or morally condemned, and as such toxic, must be rejected. Hence, call it good! Nevertheless, because of the created distance, the ironic reconstruction of the case turns out to be something comic and even ridiculous.
I want to say that the situation itself is ironic and the speaker merely recognizes this agent-independent fact and then celebrates it by unleashing its inherent ironies in a speech act. This looks like psycho-linguistic alchemy when discrepancies rejected as toxic turn via false descriptions into something else that indeed is worth celebrating in comic terms.
An instance of free irony is thus related mimetically to situational irony, that is, free irony becomes possible because it copies the idea of irony from the situational case. In this way free irony copies and represents situational cases, sometimes directly using a situational case as a model, sometimes indirectly by creating its ironic representation as if from nowhere but at the same time tacitly referring to the toxic situation in question.
In the second case, one mimics the very case of situational irony itself by focusing on the lack of irony in the original idea. If one shows war victims, one is simply criticizing war. The point is, any refusal to recognize situational irony is in itself ironic: one may ask, is it not ironic that they do not see any irony here? This was at the same time a prediction and threat.
Socratic irony also may turn into sarcasm: Socrates says he knows nothing, although he clearly is a wise man.
He even says he is wise because he knows nothing. But we may put this in another way, namely, if you are a wise man you are, for that very reason, an ignoramus, which is to say good is bad: wisdom now looks toxic. This is a sarcasm. We drew a line between irony and sarcasm: the two concepts, though related, do serve different purposes.
Of course, one may define sarcasm as strong irony or extended evil irony dictionary meaning. Nevertheless, we need a term to identify a linguistic trope that is related to irony but has its own logic; hence, two different tropes exist, and we need a name for both of them.
The question is: are these two tropes somehow symmetric? For instance, irony may entail criticism; sarcasm does not. You should criticize what is bad, but you cannot criticize good. Let us see how this works out.
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