The Role of Irony in Literature. A Joint Interpretation of Wallace's "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" and Flaubert's "Madame Bovary"

The Role of Irony in Literature. A Joint Interpretation of Wallace's Author: Céline Sun
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668855722
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 19

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Literature - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Cambridge (Faculty of Divinity), course: Religious Themes in Literature, language: English, abstract: By drawing on an existing study on existentialist engagement in David Foster Wallace’s œuvre to make a connection to "Madame Bovary", this essay will argue for and examine the similarity of the problems illuminated in the two works as they both deal with the relation between the sense of self and the acknowledgment of a transcendent reality. The focus will be on "Madame Bovary". At first sight, the ironic character of "Madame Bovary" appears to be susceptible to Wallace’s criticism of irony. I will show that, despite his use of irony, Flaubert is ultimately as committed to recognizing a transcendent reality through his writing. Gustave Flaubert’s "Madame Bovary" and David Foster Wallace’s "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" were written nearly 150 years apart. Flaubert, on the one hand, is often categorized within the tradition of realism – a label that he himself rejected – which followed a literary period of romanticism. On the other hand, Wallace, as a contemporary writer, enters a stage that is dominated by postmodern thinking. Both their writings are shaped by their critical engagement with the literary movement and social reality of their time and the protagonists of their writings are created as prototypes of the mind-set they seek to criticize through literary reflection. Due to the differences in their literary context, however, it seems natural to assume that the two writers have very different literary agendas. Flaubert appears to propose through his writings a radical dissociation in face of and opposition to both the escapist tendencies of romantic novels and the reality of bourgeois society of his time, whereas Wallace criticizes the exact tendency of ironic dissociation as they have become rife in post-modern literature.

Cool Characters

Cool Characters PDF Author: Lee Konstantinou
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674969472
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Lee Konstantinou examines irony in American literary and political life, showing how it migrated from the countercultural margins of the 1950s to the 1980s mainstream. Along the way, irony was absorbed into postmodern theory and ultimately become a target of recent writers who have moved beyond its limitations with a practice of “postirony.”

The Meaning of Irony

The Meaning of Irony PDF Author: Frank Stringfellow
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791419786
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Genuinely interdisciplinary in approach, The Meaning of Irony brings together literary analysis and, from psychoanalysis, both theory and case studies. Its investigation ranges from everyday examples of verbal irony—conscious and unconscious—to the complex irony of literature. This book provides the first full account of verbal irony from a psychoanalytic point of view. Stringfellow shows how the rhetorical tradition, by viewing the literal level of irony as something the speaker doesn’t really mean, flattens out the rich ambiguities of irony and misses the unconscious meanings that are hidden behind ironic statement. He argues that only psychoanalysis can recover these unconscious meanings and reveal the origins of irony.

Irony's Edge

Irony's Edge PDF Author: Linda Hutcheon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134937547
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
The edge of irony, says Linda Hutcheon, is always a social and political edge. Irony depends upon interpretation; it happens in the tricky, unpredictable space between expression and understanding. Irony's Edge is a fascinating, compulsively readable study of the myriad forms and the effects of irony. It sets out, for the first time, a sustained, clear analysis of the theory and the political contexts of irony, using a wide range of references from contemporary culture. Examples extend from Madonna to Wagner, from a clever quip in conversation to a contentious exhibition in a museum. Irony's Edge outlines and then challenges all the major existing theories of irony, providing the most comprehensive and critically challengin theory of irony to date.

The Element of Irony in English Literature

The Element of Irony in English Literature PDF Author: Francis McDougall Charlewood Turner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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The Element of Irony in English Literature

The Element of Irony in English Literature PDF Author: F. M. C. Turner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107426596
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description
Originally published in 1926, this book presents a concise analysis of the nature of irony in English literature, with special emphasis on 'prophetic irony'. Discussion focuses on examples taken from prose literature, with an introductory section on the meaning of irony.

Irony and the Ironic

Irony and the Ironic PDF Author: D. C. Muecke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315388324
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
First published in 1970 and revised in 1982, this work provides a critical overview of the concept of irony in literary criticism. After establishing the relationship of the ironical and the non-ironical, it summarises the history of the concept of irony, before isolating and discussing its basic aspects and the variable features that determine its nature, effect and quality. The book will be a useful resource for those studying irony and English Literature.

The Element of Irony in English Literature

The Element of Irony in English Literature PDF Author: Francis M. Turner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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James Joyce's Negations

James Joyce's Negations PDF Author: Brian Cosgrove
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
The main purpose of this book is to validate a reading of Joyce in negative terms. Central to the enquiry is an examination of the roles of irony and of indeterminacy. Irony, interpreted in metaphysical rather than merely rhetorical terms, is envisaged as deriving from two separate if related orientations, one associated with Friedrich Schlegel, the other with Gustave Flaubert. Insofar as Joyce's work (including "Ulysses") owes more to the latter than the former, it forgoes the genial humour central to Schlegel's theories, and embraces instead the ironic detachment and formal control of a Flaubertian perspective. Such irony (which entails a suspicion of sentiment and a related dehumanisation of character, as in some of the stories in Dubliners) becomes normative in Joyce, and along with a similarly deflationary parody pervades "Ulysses". In addition, a persistent indeterminacy is established as early as 'The Dead', so that it becomes impossible in that story to adjudicate between not just contradictory but mutually exclusive interpretations. Such indeterminacy is pushed to further extremes in "Ulysses", with its notorious proliferation of narrative perspectives.As a corollary to the work's encyclopaedic inclusiveness and quotidian particularism, every detail tends to assume the same significance as every other; the consequence being that (in Gyorgy Lukacs' famous formulation) we lose all sense of any 'hierarchy of meaning'. From that it is but a step to Franco Moretti's assessment that in "Ulysses" everyday existence remains 'inert, opaque - meaningless', and that in fact the whole point is to represent the meaningless precisely 'as meaningless'. Indeterminacy, in effect, ushers in the possibility of nihilism. The analysis of "Ulysses" culminates with the attempt (unavailing in both cases) to discover in either Bloom or Molly a genuine source of countervailing affirmation. The study concludes with a brief consideration of the polysemic vocabulary of "Finnegans Wake" as a logical extrapolation of the poetics of indeterminacy.

The Element of Irony in English Literature

The Element of Irony in English Literature PDF Author: Francis McDougall Charlewood Turner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780841426535
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 109

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Book Description