Irony and the Logic of Modernity / / Armen Avanessian.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus DeG Package 2015 Part 1
• VerfasserIn: Avanessian, Armen,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2015]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Series: Paradigms : Literature and the Human Sciences , 3
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (229 p.)

The logic of modernity is an ironical logic. Modern irony, a flash of genius produced by Romantic theorists, is first discussed, e.g. in Hegel and Kierkegaard, as an ethical problem personified in figures such as the aesthete, the seducer, the flaneur, or the dandy. It fully develops in the novel, the modern genre par excellence: in novels of the early 19th century no less than in those of postmodernity or in those of the masters of citation, parody, and pastiche of classical modernism (Musil, Joyce, and Proust). This book, however, goes one step further. Looking at how such different authors as Schmitt, Kafka, and Rorty identify the political conflicts, contradictions, and paradoxes of the 20th century as ironical and offers a comprehensive account of the constitutive irony of modernity’s ethical, poetical, and political logic.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part One: Rhetorologies -- Introduction -- 1. Successful Reconciliation -- 2. A Desire for Art -- 3. Mad Consciousness -- Part Two: Ethica -- Introduction -- 1. The Irony of Evil -- 2. Must We Aestheticize? -- 3. Masking Irony -- 4. The Melancholic Subject -- 5. The Joy of Dissimulation -- Part Three: Novel – Modernity – Irony -- Introduction -- 1. The Philosophy of History and the Poetics of Genre -- 2. The Language of the Novel -- 3. From Micro-irony (Quotation) to Macro-irony (Genre) -- 4. Novels of (De)formation and Ironic Autobiographies -- Part Four: Ironic Politics -- Introduction -- 1. The Struggle with Irony -- 2. Thesis and Antithesis -- 3. The Irony of the Law (Kafka and Deleuze ) -- Bibliography -- Index