Date of Award
12-1-1998
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
First Advisor
Sam Umland
Committee Members
Rebecca Umland, English
Gene Fendt, Philosophy
Richard Jussel, English
Abstract/Description
In this thesis, the author explores a novel way of formulating the otherwise old and tired trope of irony. Chapter one begins by examining some common literary critical views of irony. Wayne C. Booth conceives of irony mostly as a very finite operation--the author states something in such a way that the clever reader realizes the author in fact means the opposite of what he says. The reader, then, performs what Booth calls a "reconstruction," and once the reconstruction is finished, so is the irony's "effect." Paul Bove wants to replace irony with what he calls a "destructive poetics." Irony, for Bove, is an oppressive literary critical tool of New Criticism, a school of literary criticism Bove believes has drained texts of their richness and meaning. However, Bove confuses irony wlth ambiguity, and in so doing "flattens" texts into mere battles of relative meaning. Finally, Burke reveals irony's more slippery nature, seeing It as fundamental conflicts between "substantial" and "adjectival" voices within a text. For him, irony is one of the few operations within a text that prevents the text from lapsing into the simplicities of relativism. Irony constitutes a fundamental conflict with an ever unfolding dialectic. Hence, Burke comes closest to Kierkegaard's view of irony, for only Burke and Kierkegaard sense the truly infinite nature of irony. The other critics all seem to see irony as something finite and limited.
Kierkegaard, on the other hand, conceives of irony as an infinite operation, a neverendlng conflict whose dialectical quality never fully can be laid out. Irony, for Kierkegaard, represents a point of view towards the world and towards subjective freedom. Irony is indeterminate, not because it means so many different things at once, but because It means two very opposed things at once--lrony confronts the reader with a disjunction, an either/or, thereby obligating the reader to make a decision, an existential appropriatioll, but in such a way that the reader also sees where her commitments already lay. This, in itself, still is too abstract, until, however, we see just what that conflict is for Kierkegaard: irony always is a conflict between the two spheres of human being that most define human being. These two spheres are the aesthetic and the ethical, where the former always entails some claim of desire, and the latter entails the claim of the moral imperative (and one that looks very much like Kant's notion of moral imperative). Thus, the aesthetic asserts its claim(s)--the claims of desire--and the ethical asserts its singular claim--the claim of the universalizable and categorical imperative of the moral law. And the result is irony. Irony always is a clash between the ethical and the aesthetic. And this clash Is always antinomic, or disjunctive, In character.
Finally, chapter three applies this theory of irony to three specific texts: Swift's "A Modest Proposal," Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," and the first five books of Plato's Republic, in an attempt to show how this fundamental conflict between the ethical and the aesthetic mimetically represents the "free play" we often witness in ironic texts. The hope is to reveal to the reader that Kierkegaard's characterization of irony is not useless abstraction, but something that can be existentially appropriated, and in fact constitutes a necessary test or trial for any reader in her endeavor to become herself.
Recommended Citation
Carper, Michael T., "The Hammer and the Anvil: The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Kierkegaard" (1998). English Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity. 28.
https://openspaces.unk.edu/eng-etd/28