All 50 Uses of
irony
in
How to Read Literature Like a Professor
- These similarities—and they may be straight or ironic or comic or tragic—begin to reveal themselves to readers after much practice of reading.
Chpt 5ironic = when what happens is very different than what might be expected
- The author may be reworking a message, exploring changes (or continuities) in attitudes from one era to another, recalling parts of an earlier work to highlight features of the newly created one, drawing on associations the reader holds in order to fashion something new and, ironically, original.
Chpt 6
- Irony features fairly prominently in the use not only of Shakespeare but of any prior writer.
Chpt 6
- You might regard that outlook with a certain irony and borrow a phrase from it to express that irony—how the certainty that the earth and humanity will renew themselves, a certainty that has governed human assumptions since earliest times, has just been shredded by four years in which Western civilization tried with some success to destroy itself.
Chpt 7
- You might regard that outlook with a certain irony and borrow a phrase from it to express that irony—how the certainty that the earth and humanity will renew themselves, a certainty that has governed human assumptions since earliest times, has just been shredded by four years in which Western civilization tried with some success to destroy itself.
Chpt 7
- Many modern and postmodern texts are essentially ironic, in which the allusions to biblical sources are used not to heighten continuities between the religious tradition and the contemporary moment but to illustrate a disparity or disruption.
Chpt 7
- Needless to say, such uses of irony can cause trouble.
Chpt 7
- He knew not everyone would understand his ironic version of a holy text; what he could not imagine was that he could be so far misunderstood as to induce a fatwa, a sentence of death, to he issued against him.
Chpt 7
- Quite often, though, ironic parallels are lighter, more comic in their outcome and not so likely to offend.
Chpt 7
- Rather, we're trying to make use of details or patterns, portions of some prior story (or, once you really start thinking like a professor, "prior text," since everything is a text) to add depth and texture to your story, to bring out a theme, to lend irony to a statement, to play with readers' deeply ingrained knowledge of fairy tales.
Chpt 8
- Once you've seen Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck in a version of one of the classics, you pretty much own it as part of your consciousness. In fact, it will be hard to read the Grimm Brothers and not think Warner Brothers. Doesn't that work out to be sort of ironic? Absolutely.
Chpt 8
- Irony, in various guises, drives a great deal of fiction and poetry, even when the work isn't overtly ironic or when the irony is subtle.
Chpt 8
- Irony, in various guises, drives a great deal of fiction and poetry, even when the work isn't overtly ironic or when the irony is subtle.
Chpt 8ironic = being different than what might be expected
- Irony, in various guises, drives a great deal of fiction and poetry, even when the work isn't overtly ironic or when the irony is subtle.
Chpt 8irony = when what happens is different than what might be expected
- Ironically, their symbols of power—BMW, Rolex watch, money, expensive clothes—don't help them a bit and actually make them more vulnerable.
Chpt 8ironically = when what happens is very different than what might be expected
- Whenever fairy tales and their simplistic worldview crop up in connection with our complicated and morally ambiguous world, you can almost certainly plan on irony.
Chpt 8
- Okay, but tough to live up to the comparison, so be prepared for irony.
Chpt 8
- The whole thing is less derivative than it sounds and not without humor and irony.
Chpt 9
- In our modern world, of course, parallels may be ironized, that is, turned on their head for purposes of irony.
Chpt 9
- Still, we can see it as resembling the Homeric original only if we understand that resemblance in terms of a funhouse mirror, full of distortion and goofy correspondences—if we understand it, in other words, as an ironic parallel.
Chpt 9
- The fact that it's ironic makes the parallel—and the Aeolus episode—such fun.
Chpt 9
- Hardy doesn't call it that, but he has great fun describing, in his ironic and detached tone, the rain lashing down on hapless wayfarers, forcing them to seek shelter where they can; hence the appearance of our three gentlemen callers.
Chpt 10
- Rain can bring the world back to life, to new growth, to the return of the green world. Of course, novelists being what they are, they generally use this function ironically.
In the ending of A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway, having killed off Frederic Henry's lover during childbirth, sends the grieving protagonist out of the hospital into, you guessed it, rain.
Chpt 10
- In the ending of A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway, having killed off Frederic Henry's lover during childbirth, sends the grieving protagonist out of the hospital into, you guessed it, rain.
It might be ironic enough to die during childbirth, which is also associated with spring, but the rain, which we might properly expect to be life-giving, further heightens the irony.
Chpt 10
- In the ending of A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway, having killed off Frederic Henry's lover during childbirth, sends the grieving protagonist out of the hospital into, you guessed it, rain.
It might be ironic enough to die during childbirth, which is also associated with spring, but the rain, which we might properly expect to be life-giving, further heightens the irony.
Chpt 10irony = when what happens is very different than what might be expected; or when things are together that seem like they don't belong together
- It's hard to get irony too high for Hemingway.
Chpt 10irony = when what happens is very different than what might be expected
- Joyce likes his irony about as high as Hemingway's.
Chpt 10
- Now if you're a modernist poet and therefore given to irony (notice that I've not yet alluded to modernism without having recourse to irony?
Chpt 10
- Now if you're a modernist poet and therefore given to irony (notice that I've not yet alluded to modernism without having recourse to irony?
Chpt 10
- The structure of the novel utilizes the various episodes of the ancient epic, although ironically—Odysseus's trip to the underworld, for instance, becomes a trip to the cemetery; his encounter with Circe, an enchantress who turns men into swine, becomes a trip to a notorious brothel by the protagonists.
Chpt 10b
- Of course, things change when irony comes in, but that's another matter.
Chpt 11
- One of the ironies of her Indian experience is that in a landscape so vast, the psychological space is so small;
Chpt 12ironies = things that are very different than what might be expected
- Of course, Eliot's work is heavily ironic, and as we'll discuss later, everything changes when irony climbs aboard.
Chpt 12ironic = when what happens is very different than what might be expected
- Of course, Eliot's work is heavily ironic, and as we'll discuss later, everything changes when irony climbs aboard.
Chpt 12
- There, however, we're starting to get into irony, and that's a whole different area where I don't want to go just yet.
Chpt 14
- Or maybe it is all being treated ironically, to make the character look smaller rather than greater.
Chpt 14
- First, as I have intimated several times before and will discuss later, irony trumps everything.
Chpt 15
- But irony typically depends on an established pattern on which it can work its inversions.
Chpt 15 *
- All of Carter's irony here, naturally enough, builds on a foundation of expectations having to do with flying and wings.
Chpt 15
- Social criticism is the outcome of this subversive strategy, flight the device by which Carter sets up her ironic notions of freedom and imprisonment.
Chpt 15
- Like Carter, Garcia Marquez plays on our notions of wings and flight to explore the situation's ironic possibilities.
Chpt 15
- Perhaps he wants to accentuate the comic or ironic incongruity between the brevity of the sexual act and its consequences.
Chpt 17
- Will she play it straight or use spring ironically?
Chpt 20
- What we learn, finally, as readers is that we don't look for a shorthand in seasonal use—summer means x, winter y minus x—but a set of patterns that can be employed in a host of ways, some of them straightforward, others ironic or subversive.
Chpt 20
- In fact, our responses are so deeply ingrained that seasonal associations are among the easiest for the writer to upend and use ironically.
Chpt 20ironically = in a manner where what happens is very different than what might be expected
- The novel, which deals with the generation that was damaged in so many ways by World War I, is an ironic reworking of the wasteland motif.
Chpt 21ironic = when what happens is very different than what might be expected
- Of course, what this means is up for grabs, since Beckett is employing irony, and not very subtly.
Chpt 22
- Consider the possibilities for irony. For an English professor, and for any avid reader, having a blithely ignorant (and only recently clued-in) husband narrate the saga of his wife's longtime infidelity is about as good as it gets.†
Chpt 23
- Of course excessive drinking is bad for you—excessive anything, including irony, is bad for you—but that's not the point.
Chpt 23irony = when what happens is very different than what might be expected
- Now, about that irony.
Chpt 23