Irony

This term itself was coined in reference to a stock-character from Old Comedy (such as that of Aristophanes) known as the eiron, who dissimulates and affects less intelligence than he has—and so ultimately triumphs over his opposite, the alazon, a vain-glorious braggart.

[1][2][3] Although initially synonymous with lying, in Plato's dialogues eironeia came to acquire a new sense of "an intended simulation which the audience or hearer was meant to recognise".

[4] More simply put, it came to acquire the general definition, "the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect".

[5] Until the Renaissance, the Latin ironia was considered a part of rhetoric, usually a species of allegory, along the lines established by Cicero and Quintilian near the beginning of the 1st century CE.

[7] Around the end of the 18th century, "irony" takes on another sense, primarily credited to Friedrich Schlegel and other participants in what came to be known as early German Romanticism.

They advance a concept of irony that is not a mere "artistic playfulness", but a "conscious form of literary creation", typically involving the "consistent alternation of affirmation and negation".

[10][11][12] Philosopher Richard J. Bernstein opens his Ironic Life with the observation that a survey of the literature on irony leaves the reader with the "dominant impression" that the authors are simply "talking about different subjects".

[13] Indeed, Geoffrey Nunberg, a lexical semantician, observes a trend of sarcasm replacing the linguistic role of verbal irony as a result of all this confusion.

[31][27] Building upon the double-level structure of irony, self-described "ironologist" D. C. Muecke proposes another, complementary way in which we may typify, and so better understand, ironic phenomena.

As he puts it, the use of irony is An aggressively intellectual exercise that fuses fact and value, requiring us to construct alternative hierarchies and choose among them; [it] demands that we look down on other men's follies or sins; floods us with emotion-charged value judgments which claim to be backed by the mind; accuses other men not only of wrong beliefs but of being wrong at their very foundations and blind to what these foundations imply[.

In more philosophical contexts, however, the term is sometimes assigned a more general significance, in which it is used to describe an entire way of life or a universal truth about the human situation.

Even Booth, whose interest is expressly rhetorical, notes that the word "irony" tends to attach to "a type of character — Aristophanes' foxy eirons, Plato's disconcerting Socrates — rather than to any one device".

[47][48] This usage has its origins primarily in the work of Friedrich Schlegel and other early 19th-century German Romantics and in Søren Kierkegaard's analysis of Socrates in The Concept of Irony.

In the words of scholar Frederick C. Beiser, Schlegel presents irony as consisting in "the recognition that, even though we cannot attain truth, we still must forever strive toward it, because only then do we approach it."

[56] As Beiser puts it, "Schlegel intentionally explodes the narrow literary meaning of Poesie by explicitly identifying the poetic with the creative power in human beings, and indeed with the productive principle in nature itself."

[65][66] These readings overstate the irrational dimension of early Romantic thought at the expense of its rational commitments—precisely the dilemma irony is introduced to resolve.

[68] According to Rüdiger Bubner, however, Hegel's "misunderstanding" of Schlegel's concept of irony is "total" in its denunciation of a figure actually intended to preserve "our openness to a systematic philosophy".

Scholar K. Brian Söderquist argues that these fictive authors should be viewed as explorations of the existential challenges posed by such an ironic, poetic self-consciousness.

Their awareness of their own unlimited powers of self-interpretation prevents them from fully committing to any single self-narrative, and this leaves them trapped in an entirely negative mode of uncertainty.

Irony is what creates the space in which we can learn and meaningfully choose how to live a life worthy (vita digna[76]) of being called human.

No order, no far goal of time, ordained by God or right reason, determines the progression of human or natural events […] Of course, romantic irony itself has more than one mode.

That of all the several ways of beginning a book […] I am confident my own way of doing it is bestSince I've started this story, I've gotten boils […]Additionally, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction says of John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, "For the first twelve chapters...the reader has been able to immerse him or herself in the story, enjoying the kind of 'suspension of disbelief' required of realist novels...what follows is a remarkable act of metafictional 'frame-breaking'".

For instance, various reference sources assert the following: The psychologist Rod A. Martin, in The Psychology of Humour (2007), is quite clear that irony is where "the literal meaning is opposite to the intended" and sarcasm is "aggressive humor that pokes fun".

[92] Some psycholinguistic theorists[93] suggest that sarcasm, hyperbole, understatement, rhetorical questions, double entendre, and jocularity should all be considered forms of verbal irony.

The differences between these rhetorical devices (tropes) can be quite subtle and relate to typical emotional reactions of listeners, and the goals of the speakers.

Regardless of the various ways theorists categorize figurative language types, people in conversation who are attempting to interpret speaker intentions and discourse goals do not generally identify the kinds of tropes used.

[94] Some speakers of English complain that the words irony and ironic are often misused,[95] though the more general casual usage of a contradiction between circumstance and expectation originated in the 1640s.

[96][example needed] Tim Conley cites the following: "Philip Howard assembled a list of seven implied meanings for the word "ironically", as it opens a sentence: The term is sometimes used as a synonym for incongruous and applied to "every trivial oddity" in situations where there is no double audience.