Download or read book Irony in the Age of Empire written by Cynthia Willett and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-09 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comedy, from social ridicule to the unruly laughter of the carnival, provides effective tools for reinforcing social patterns of domination as well as weapons for emancipation. In Irony in the Age of Empire, Cynthia Willett asks: What could embody liberation better than laughter? Why do the oppressed laugh? What vision does the comic world prescribe? For Willett, the comic trumps standard liberal accounts of freedom by drawing attention to bodies, affects, and intimate relationships, topics which are usually neglected by political philosophy. Willett's philosophical reflection on comedy issues a powerful challenge to standard conceptions of freedom by proposing a new kind of freedom that is unapologetically feminist, queer, and multiracial. This book provides a wide-ranging, original, thoughtful, and expansive discussion of citizenship, social manners, and political freedom in our world today.
Download or read book Irony Misogyny and Interpretation written by Tom Grimwood and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2012-12-04 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it to claim that “misogyny” might be “ironic”? Why is it that, in the works of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, the possibility of irony constantly interferes with a conclusive ethical judgement over the meaning of their “misogyny”? How do we hold our interpretations of such ambiguous texts ethically accountable? This book brings together the driving concerns of hermeneutics, feminist philosophy and the history of philosophy in dealing with the “problem of irony”. It develops a thematic account of the concept of irony as a philosophical form of interpretation, and explores this through close readings of three key sites of controversy regarding the relationship between irony and misogyny: Schopenhauer’s “On Women”, Kierkegaard’s “In Vino Veritas” and Nietzsche’s “Woman and Child”. Far from a distraction from or “excuse” for misogyny, the book argues that ironic ambiguity is a formative aspect of all three texts; and explores the different ways in which the authority of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are constructed in terms of the problem of irony.
Download or read book The Politics of Irony in American Modernism written by Matthew Stratton and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize This book shows how American literary culture in the first half of the twentieth century saw “irony” emerge as a term to describe intersections between aesthetic and political practices. Against conventional associations of irony with political withdrawal, Stratton shows how the term circulated widely in literary and popular culture to describe politically engaged forms of writing. It is a critical commonplace to acknowledge the difficulty of defining irony before stipulating a particular definition as a stable point of departure for literary, cultural, and political analysis. This book, by contrast, is the first to derive definitions of “irony” inductively, showing how writers employed it as a keyword both before and in opposition to the institutionalization of New Criticism. It focuses on writers who not only composed ironic texts but talked about irony and satire to situate their work politically: Randolph Bourne, Benjamin De Casseres, Ellen Glasgow, John Dos Passos, Ralph Ellison, and many others.
Download or read book Of Irony and Empire written by Laura Rice and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of Irony and Empire is a dynamic, thorough examination of Muslim writers from former European colonies in Africa who have increasingly entered into critical conversations with the metropole. Focusing on the period between World War I and the present, "the age of irony," this book explores the political and symbolic invention of Muslim Africa and its often contradictory representations. Through a critical analysis of irony and resistance in works by writers who come from nomadic areas around the Sahara—Mustapha Tlili (Tunisia), Malika Mokeddem (Algeria), Cheikh Hamidou Kane (Senegal), and Tayeb Salih (Sudan)—Laura Rice offers a fresh perspective that accounts for both the influence of the Western, instrumental imaginary, and the Islamic, holistic one.
Download or read book The Irony of American History written by Reinhold Niebuhr and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-01-22 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”—President Barack Obama Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr’s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr’s wisdom will cause readers to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace. “The supreme American theologian of the twentieth century.”—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., New York Times “Niebuhr is important for the left today precisely because he warned about America’s tendency—including the left’s tendency—to do bad things in the name of idealism. His thought offers a much better understanding of where the Bush administration went wrong in Iraq.”—Kevin Mattson, The Good Society “Irony provides the master key to understanding the myths and delusions that underpin American statecraft. . . . The most important book ever written on US foreign policy.”—Andrew J. Bacevich, from the Introduction
Download or read book Edge of Irony written by Marjorie Perloff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as "Avant-Garde in a Different Key: Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind," Critical Inquiry 40, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 311-38."
Download or read book Of Irony and Empire written by Laura Rice and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2008-06-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the transformative power of irony in the creation of Muslim Africa.
Download or read book The Ironic Spectator written by Lilie Chouliaraki and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-08-26 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER of the 2015 ICA Outstanding Book Award This path-breaking book explores how solidarity towards vulnerable others is performed in our media environment. It argues that stories where famine is described through our own experience of dieting or or where solidarity with Africa translates into wearing a cool armband tell us about much more than the cause that they attempt to communicate. They tell us something about the ways in which we imagine the world outside ourselves. By showing historical change in Amnesty International and Oxfam appeals, in the Live Aid and Live 8 concerts, in the advocacy of Audrey Hepburn and Angelina Jolie as well as in earthquake news on the BBC, this far-reaching book shows how solidarity has today come to be not about conviction but choice, not vision but lifestyle, not others but ourselves – turning us into the ironic spectators of other people’s suffering.
Download or read book The Irony of Manifest Destiny written by William Pfaff and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-07-23 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For years there has been little or no critical reexamination of how and why the ultimately successful postwar American policy of 'patient but firm and vigilant containment of Soviet expansionist tendencies...and pressure against the free institutions of the western world' (as George Kennan formulated it at the time) has over six decades turned into a vast project for ending tyranny in the world. We defend this position by making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities. This is where the problem lies. It has become somewhat of a national heresy to suggest the U.S. does not have a unique moral status and role to play in the history of nations and therefore in the affairs of the contemporary world. In fact it does not." Cogently, thoughtfully, powerfully, William Pfaff--whose columns and commentary over the past 40-odd years have given him the widest international influence of any American commentator--lays out the historical roots behind the American exceptionalism that has animated our politics and foreign relations for decades, and makes clear why it is flawed and bound to fail. Those roots lie in the secularization of western society brought about by the Enlightenment. "My proposition in this book is that the United States' spearation from 1800 to 1941 from the common history of the west has disqualified it from the mandate it has assumed as the society that embodies the future"...and in many ways is responsible for the impasse in which it finds itself at the end of the disastrous events of the last 8 years. "It has failed to learn from experience because it lacks the indispensable experience Europeans have acquired of modern ideological folly and national tragedy."
Download or read book Isn t it Ironic written by Ian Kinane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-25 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the relationship between irony and popular culture and the role of the consumer in determining and disseminating meaning. Arguing that in a cultural climate largely characterised by fractious communications and perilous linguistic exchanges, the very role of irony in popular culture needs to come under greater scrutiny, it focuses on the many uses, abuses, and misunderstandings of irony in contemporary popular culture, and explores the troubling political populism at the heart of many supposedly satirical and (apparently) non-satirical texts. In an environment in which irony is frequently claimed as a defence for material and behaviour judged controversial, how do we, as a society entrenched in forms of popular culture and media, interpret work that is intended as satire but which reads as unironic? How do we accurately decode works of popular film, literature, television, music, and other cultural forms which sell themselves as bitingly ironic commentaries on current society, but which are also problematic celebrations of the very issues they purport to critique? And what happens when texts intended and received in one manner are themselves ironically recontextualised in another? Bringing together studies across a range of cultural texts including popular music, film and television, Isn’t it Ironic? will appeal to scholars of the social sciences and humanities with interests in cultural studies, media studies, popular culture, literary studies and sociology.
Download or read book Ambiguous Adventure written by Hamidou Kane and published by Heinemann. This book was released on 1972 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sambo Diallo is unable to identify with the soulless material civilization he finds in France, where he is sent to learn the secrets of the white man's power.
Download or read book A Child s Garden of Verses written by Robert Louis Stevenson and published by . This book was released on 1898 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of poems evoking the world and feelings of childhood.
Download or read book Irony s Edge written by Linda Hutcheon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The edge of irony, says Linda Hutcheon, is always a social and political edge. Irony depends upon interpretation; it happens in the tricky, unpredictable space between expression and understanding. Irony's Edge is a fascinating, compulsively readable study of the myriad forms and the effects of irony. It sets out, for the first time, a sustained, clear analysis of the theory and the political contexts of irony, using a wide range of references from contemporary culture. Examples extend from Madonna to Wagner, from a clever quip in conversation to a contentious exhibition in a museum. Irony's Edge outlines and then challenges all the major existing theories of irony, providing the most comprehensive and critically challengin theory of irony to date.
Download or read book Law Rhetoric and Irony in the Formation of Canadian Civil Culture written by Michael Dorland and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rhetoric, Irony, and Law in the Formation of Canadian Civil Culture, Michael Dorland and Maurice Charland examine how, over the roughly 400-year period since the encounter of First Peoples with Europeans in North America, rhetorical or discursive fields took form in politics and constitution-making, in the formation of a public sphere, and in education and language. The study looks at how these fields changed over time within the French regime, the British regime, and in Canada since 1867, and how they converged through trial and error into a Canadian civil culture. The authors establish a triangulation of fields of discourse formed by law (as a technical discourse system), rhetoric (as a public discourse system), and irony (as a means of accessing the public realm as the key pillars upon which a civil culture in Canada took form) in order to scrutinize the process of creating a civil culture. By presenting case studies ranging from the legal implications of the transition from French to English law to the continued importance of the Louis Riel case and trial, the authors provide detailed analyses of how communication practices form a common institutional culture. As scholars of communication and rhetoric, Dorland and Charland have written a challenging examination of the history of Canadian governance and the central role played by legal and other discourses in the formation of civil culture.
Download or read book Irony and the Poetry of the First World War written by S. Puissant and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-03-19 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does irony affect the evaluation and perception of the First World War both then and now? Irony and the Poetry of the First World War traces one of the major features of war poetry from the author's application as a means of disguise, criticism or psychological therapy to its perception and interpretation by the reader.
Download or read book Stand Up Preaching written by Jacob D. Myers and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few vocations share more in common with preaching than stand-up comedy. Each profession demands attention to the speaker’s bodily and facial gestures, tone and inflection, timing, and thoughtful engagement with contemporary contexts. Furthermore, both preaching and stand-up arise out of creative tension with homiletic or comedic traditions, respectively. Every time the preacher steps into the pulpit or the comedian steps onto the stage, they must measure their words and gestures against their audience’s expectations and assumptions. They participate in a kind of dance that is at once choreographed and open to improvisation. It is these and similar commonalities between preaching and stand-up comedy that this book engages. Stand-Up Preaching does not aim to help preachers tell better jokes. The focus of this book is far more expansive. Given the recent popularity of comedy specials, preachers have greater access to a broad array of emerging comics who showcase fresh comedic styles and variations on comedic traditions. Coupled with the perennial Def Comedy Jams on HBO, preachers also have ready access to the work of classic comics who have exhibited great storytelling and stage presence. This book will offer readers tools to discern what is homiletically significant in historical and contemporary stand-up routines, equipping them with fresh ways to riff off of their respective preaching traditions, and nuanced ways to engage issues of contemporary sociopolitical importance.
Download or read book The Irony of Fate written by Angela Alexander and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2001-09-11 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tameras Ranse, a Terat assassin, awakes in unfamiliar surroundings. She learns the secrets of her enemy, the mysterious, politically powerful Ekosian king, whose identity has been closely guarded since his parents' assassination. Tameras upsets his life by meeting him, being able to recognize him; and then, when she later discovers he is also a Sovereign warrior, Ken Johnson, under the command of her own godfather. After being challenged by Ken, she develops a conscience, and fails one of her missions. She is captured. He saves her life by lying about her presence and marrying her. Afterward, they agree to dissolve the marriage, but Fate intervenes, forcing them to work together to end a horrible civil war on planet Dojo. There, they draw out the would-be assassin from whom Ken has been hiding his entire life, and successfully negotiate peace. Surrounded by secret identities and treacherous deceit, they survive not only their adventures together, but also their individual journeys into self-discovery.
