How is irony both a problem of knowledge and a problem of politics? Speech that says one thing but means another puts pressure not only on the ability to distinguish the fake from the sincere, but also on the very idea of “authentic” expression or indisputable evidence. Irony, a notoriously slippery concept, has been a way of giving incendiary truths an alibi, a coping mechanism in a harsh world, a tool for dismissing unpalatable evidence of suffering, a retreat into nihilism, and a form of comedy. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates pretends ignorance in order to draw out the hypocrisy of others. The troubadours cultivated a kind of irony that couched illicit love in the terms of satire and social satire in the terms of illicit love. These differ, yet again, from the elegant detachment of Austen’s narrators, the irony of poets writing in the wake of the First World War, and the queer irony of camp. And all are a far cry from the irony that haunts contemporary digital life, where fact and fiction mingle in unpredictable quantities and irony becomes both a weapon and an opiate. What are the uses of irony? What are its politics, its aesthetics, and its most important forms?
This course, an introduction to irony’s many guises, explores its definitions and its consequences through a historically various selection of poetry, short fiction, and theory. We will investigate the many sub-species of irony—rhetorical, dramatic, tragic, cosmic, Romantic—and consider its relationship to wit, satire, and sarcasm. Along the way, we will ask: Who defends irony and what kind? On what grounds do figures like Hegel excoriate irony? On what grounds might we make a critique or mount a defense of irony? Why are conceptions of modernity and irony so often entwined? What kinds of irony are most prevalent in our own moment? Why does irony endure? The syllabus is likely to include selections from W.H. Auden, Jane Austen, James Baldwin, Charles Baudelaire, Lord Byron, Robert Browning, John Donne, Tarez Samra Graban, G.W.F. Hegel, Langston Hughes, Heinrich von Kleist, Karl Marx, Plato, Friedrich Schlegel, Shakespeare, and Susan Sontag.
