Introduction

Summary

Irony, in its contrariness, has gained a reputation for indeterminacy, for being all but ungraspable except perhaps in the most traditional contexts of wittiness, paradox, the assumption of an opposite, or a perspective of stylish but world-weary commentary. Irony in the more complicated view can now be confounding, a perspective that has become more pervasive, or at least more presumed, in connection with postmodernist or deconstructive assumptions regarding the disassociative properties of language in particular. Irony does, in fact, imply opposition, a consistent if at times hidden presence of the alternate view; and when such alternation is reiterated or compounded, the contrary properties of the ironic become correspondingly more manifest, leading potentially to progressive negation or even self-cancellation. This, in brief, is an attribute belonging innately to a trope with philosophical as well as verbal and aesthetic properties, a trait that may at times contribute to a perception of capriciousness and contradiction.

Yet irony is also capacious, with an ability to imply or embrace a universalized as well as localized or delimited perspective. The existential or ontological implications of the ironic are plenteous, even when coupled with (or, at times, because of) the self-nullifying traits that arise from a fundamental basis in antagonism and conflict. Moreover, the ironic mode is, as Northrop Frye would say, “naturally sophisticated,” one that “takes life exactly as it finds it” (Anatomy 41).