Irony on Occasion : From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man / Kevin Newmark.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Newmark, Kevin, Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (380 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

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 afterlife in twentieth-century French thought and writing. It includes chapters on Friedrich Schlegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Jean Paulhan, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man. A coda traces the way unresolved tensions inherited from Romanticism resurface in a novelist like J. M. Coetzee. But this book is neither a historical nor a thematic study of irony. To the degree that irony initiates 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 from questions 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 proceed directly to those places where "irony" is named, described, or presumed to reside. 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Gibs auf!

Give it up!

Introduction: Irony on Occasion

Part one. Romantic Irony

One. Friedrich Schlegel and the Myth of Irony

Two. Taking Kierkegaard Apart: The Concept of Irony

Three. Modernity Interrupted: Kierkegaard’s Antigone

Four. Reading Kierkegaard: To Keep Intact the Secret

Five. Fear and Trembling: “Who Is Able to Understand Abraham?”

Part two. Postromantic Irony

Six. Signs of the Times: Nietzsche, Deconstruction, and the Truth of History

Seven. Death in Venice: Irony, Detachment, and the Aesthetic State

Eight. Terrible Flowers: Jean Paulhan and the Irony of Rhetoric

Part three. The Irony of Tomorrow

Nine. On Parole: Legacies of Saussure, Blanchot, and Paulhan

Ten. “What Is Happening Today in Deconstruction”

Eleven. Bewildering: Paul de Man, Poetry, Politics

Coda: Dark Freedom in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Mrz 2022)

ISBN:

0-8232-9187-1

OCLC:

1350685528