Barthelme Unfair to Kierkegaard: Some Thoughts on Modern and Postmodern Irony

Abstract

Irony has taken some hard knocks from lately, a victim of its association with modernist strategies and theories. The reaction is understandable enough, given the urgent desire in recent years to proclaim the emergence of a new sensibility. When the mood is for manifestoes and declarations of independence, oedipal impulses typically direct themselves against the central assumptions of the previous generation or, alternately, push forward claims of radical historical discontinuity. But anyone surveying recent literature (as opposed to criticism of it) is unlikely to find reasons for either celebrating or mourning the death of irony. Whether or not one agrees with Geoffrey Thurley, for example, a preoccupation with irony and self-knowledge has secured a dislocation of sensibility exactly the reverse of the synthesis Richards, Eliot and Leavis intended to guarantee,'1 the fact is that his argument works to discredit not irony in general but what particular writers did with it. Of course, irony has undergone significant transformations since Thurley's intellectualist critics annexed it, but that is precisely the point. Somehow irony manages again and again to escape its association with this or that school and to recast itself into constantly new modes. With all the resilience and