It is somewhat more disconcerting to encounter a thirtysomething academic with tenure track in sight who has not yet learned to discriminate between irony (a word which occurs 16 times in the body of her piece), which she claims to be addressing/ redressing, and cynicism (occurring once), which she actually is. Such fudging was fairly forgivable from a 21-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter, particularly since her album was baldly awful on so many other levels that her misappropriation of a high school literary term seemed like small beer. ![]() (That particular moratorium was defied in in a piece just good enough to link.) The inquisition continues, despite the fact that we as a people seem to have a tenuous grip on what, in actual fact, irony is.Ī good deal of fun was had some years back with Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic,” with its citing of things “ironic” that were, in fact, nothing of the sort. Does anyone remember Jedediah Purdy, the wunderkind whose 1999 book, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, was released when its author was a stripling Yale Law student of 24? This was not long before the twin towers crumbled and Time and Graydon Carter announced the death of irony, which stayed on the slab for all of 48 hours. ![]() And, lo and behold, the Comments section dogpile of the week can be found atop a New York Times “Opinionator” piece by Christy Wampole, an assistant professor of French at Princeton University who proffers much-needed instruction on “ How to Live Without Irony.”Įvery few years, it seems, irony goes on trial in America. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the peculiar phenomenon of growing up parodic-that is, of having experienced the world, almost from the cradle, through the distorted lens of farce.
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