The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

124 Irony
Verbal irony usually operates by
exploiting deviations from syntactic or
semantic norms. The ability to recognize
such irony depends upon an appreciation
of the particular linguistic, or sometimes
more general social or moral, context. In
speech, it is possible to indicate by tone of
voice that the word ‘clever’ in the sentence
‘He’s a clever chap’ is to be understood
to mean ‘stupid’, but as this cannot
be said to be any of the meanings of the
word ‘clever’, the writer has to convey his
sense obliquely. Irony is thus an art of
juxtaposition and indirection, relying for
its success on such techniques as understatement,
paradox, puns and other forms
of wit in the expression of incongruities.
In the following lines from Alexander
Pope’s Rape of the Lock the contrasts
between heroic style and banal content
reflect the opposition within the lines
between the spiritual and the physical:
Whether the nymph shall break
Diana’s law,
Or some frail china jar receive a flaw;
Or stain her honour, or her new
brocade;
Forget her prayers, or miss a
masquerade.
Much modern criticism has seen, in the
ambiguities of the ironic mode, a response
to experience particularly sympathetic.
Like symbolism, allegory and metaphor,
irony provides a means for unifying the
apparent contradictions of experience, but
is also uniquely able to assert the world’s
diversity. Cleanth Brooks’s The Well
Wrought Urn (1947), is one of the more
influential mid-twentieth-century studies
that made large claims for the prevalence
and persistence of the ironic mode.
More recently, some Deconstructionist
critics, following Jacques Derrida, have
seen writing as a structure divorced from
consciousness as an absolute authority, and
agree with his conclusion that the term
irony will probably cease to be employed
in literary criticism. Paul de Man, on
the other hand, in his book, Blindness
and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism (1983), pursues
the paradoxical idea that irony is at the
same time impossible, yet, inescapable.
This debate, which lies at the centre of
Deconstructive criticism, about how there
can be ‘other’ or ironical meanings if all
we have are texts, is described at length
by C. Colebrook in her book Irony (2004).
See N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
(1957); A. K. Mellor, English Romantic
Irony (1980); D. C. Muecke, Irony and the
Ironic (1983); L. Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge:
The Theory and Politics of Irony (1994).
BCL