Irony on Occasion From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man

by Newmark, Kevin

• ISBN13: 9780823240135
• ISBN10: 0823240134
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-04-12
• Publisher: Fordham University Press

Summary

What is it about irony - as an object of serious philosophical reflection and a literary technique of considerable elasticity - that makes it an occasion for endless critical debate? This book responds to this question by focusing on several key moments in German Romanticism and its afterlifein twentieth-century French thought and writing. It includes chapters on Friedrich Schlegel, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Jean Paulhan, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man. A coda traces the way unresolved tensions inherited from Romanticism may resurface in the works of anovelist like J. M. Coetzee.But this book is neither a historical nor a thematic study of irony. To the degree that irony names a deflection of meaning, it also entails a divergence from historical and thematic models of understanding. The book therefore aims to respect irony's digressive force by allowing it to emerge fromquestions that sometimes have little or nothing to do with the ostensible topic of irony. For if irony is the possibility that whatever is being said does not coincide fully with whatever is being meant, then there is no guarantee that the most legitimate approach to the problem would proceeddirectly to those places where "irony" is described or talked about.Rather than providing a history of irony, then, this book examines particular occasions of ironic disruption. It thus offers an alternative model for conceiving of historical occurrences and their potential for acquiring meaning.

Author Biography

Kevin Newmark teaches literature and literary theory at Boston College. He is the author of Beyond Symbolism: Textual History and the Future of Reading.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction: Irony on Occasion	p. 1
Romantic Irony
Friedrich Schledgel and the Myth of Irony	p. 15
Taking Kierkegaard Apart: The Concept of Irony	p. 41
Modernity Interrupted: Kierkegaad's Antigine	p. 66
Reading Kierkegaard: To Keep Intact the Secret	p. 96
Fear and Trembling: "Who Is Able to Understand Abraham?"	p. 121
Postromantic Irony
Signs of the Times: Nietzsche, Deconstruction, and the Truth of History	p. 149
Death in Venice: Irony, Detachment, and the Aesthetic State	p. 177
Terrible Flowers: Jean Paulhan and the Irony of Rhetoric	p. 203
The Irony of Tomorrow
On Parole: Legacies of Saussure, Blanchot, and Paulhan	p. 223
"What Is Happening Today in Deconstruction"	p. 242
Bewildering: Paul de Man, Poetry, Politics	p. 261
Code: Dark Freedom in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace	p. 282
Notes	p. 297
Index	p. 351
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