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I say the future is a serious matter
And so for Godsake Hock and Soda water
Byron6 |
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It is a cliché not without its ironies that the word 'irony' has become impossibly multiform.7 The meaning, location, status, and value of the concept are all controversial. In particular, it is much disputed whether irony is a trope or a philosophy, a rhetorical device or a way of looking at the world (another opposition ripe for deconstruction by those who feel that tropes are all we have). Scholars play two familiar games: the creation of a range of distinctions, and the demonstration that those distinctions are inadequate. How many ironies dance on the end of a pin? The conceptual chaos repeats itself fractally as we descend to sub-types. My concern here is with Romantic Irony: it is true that this has been argued to be neither romantically ironic nor ironically romantic, but it remains one of the better defined sub-groups.8 Its essence lies in a rupture of sublime illusion that nevertheless in some way retains sublimity. As the title suggests, the term was first brought to prominence by the German romantic critics, and its original context was that of German idealist philosophy as elaborated by Fichte. The protos heuretes is conventionally made Friedrich Schlegel, though he did not use the phrase in his published writings.9 Here is one modern scholar's summary: |
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Schlegel . . . starts from the Fichtean philosophical position that the ego both posits the external world and is limited by it. But this limitation is overcome when, to simplify the terminology, the ego recognises what is going on and remembers that the non-ego is indeed its creature. Intelligence recognises that all its creations are relative. The poetic act analogous to the Fichtean process is that the artist, through |
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6 Stanza rejected from Don Juan (McGann 5. 88): discussed in Garber (1988b) 1536. |
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7 The bibliography on irony is huge: the most comprehensive up-to-date bibliography I know is that in Seery (1990) (see especially notes 5 and 17 to ch. 3), but most of the works mentioned here and in note 7 have good bibliographies. As a general survey in English, Muecke (1969) remains invaluable: other classics include Knox (1972) (in part a review of Muecke) and Booth (1974), which is excessively reductive but for that reason usefully sceptical. In a similar vein is Dane (1991). For postmodern irony (to which I return at the end) see Rorty (1989), Seery (1990), and Hutcheon (1991). |
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8 The most detailed treatment is that of Strohschneider-Kohrs (1977), but there is now a comprehensive volume of English essays in Garber (1988a): see especially the opening pieces by Behler and Immerwahr. See also Garber (1988b), Bourgeois (1974), Simpson (1979), Mellor (1980), Furst (1984), Finlay (1988), Prang (1989), Bishop (1989), Seery (1990) ch. 3, Dane (1991) chs 57. Immerwahr (1951) remains a classic clarification with regard to Schlegel himself. For the original texts, there is a useful collection in English translation, with good introduction, in Wheeler (1984): there is a handy two-volume edition of Friedrich Schlegel's works in the Bibliothek Deutscher Klassiker (Berlin and Weimar 1980). |
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9 See especially Immerwahr (1951) and in Garber (1988a) 8296, and Dane (1991). |
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