Reviews for A Rhetoric of Irony

The average rating for A Rhetoric of Irony based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-12-16 00:00:00 George Magalios Over the past 4 years, I've probably been a bit unfair to The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth. I know from re-visiting it from time to time that it's a solid guide to understanding voice in fiction. My problem was that I went to the book looking for a way of understanding and explicating irony in fiction, and found Booth's treatment of it there to be mostly unsatisfactory. I did not know at the time that Booth later wrote an entire book devoted to irony, which I've now read and I am (ironically?) still pretty unsatisfied, though I can hardly maintain that the author's treatment of the subject was inadequate or superficial. I guess I'm looking for something that can't exist: a key to analytically explicating irony from a purely textual analysis. But as Booth shows, understanding irony relies largely on extra-textual factors: the attitudes and worldview of author and reader, the historical situation of a text, and the context in which a text is written and read. I might summarize Booth's take on irony as, "well, it all depends…" and "I know it when I read it (and you know it when you read it, though you may know it in a far greater or lesser number of instances than I do)". The appreciation of irony requires a kind of dance of mutual recognition between author and reader: a mutual recognition of coded meaning that, because it potentially excludes some, if not many, readers, is perhaps the closest two minds can come to each other through the written word. For most of his text, Booth deals with "stable irony": ironically worded passages which the reader mentally reconstructs into the "true" meaning of the passage. He looks at a variety of ways in which this is handled by writers and understood by readers, in both extended excerpts and several complete works: A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, "All That Rises Must Converge" by Flannery O'Connor, and a number of poems. This sort of play-by-play analysis of reading irony makes explicit a process that is subconscious for most experienced readers and is helpful in illustrating Booth's more general points. Equally vital to the reading of the ironic passages in his examples of stable irony is the highlighting of the parts of the work which, for a proper understanding, need to be read un-ironically. (As indicated in many qualifications Booth gives in his analyses, such as recognizing the potential controversy raised by the idea of "proper" or "correct" reading, the author always feels himself on shaky ground in making categorical statements and goes to some lengths to define the limits and assumptions of his inquiry into irony.) As important in understanding irony as the ability to detect it in the first place, is the knowledge of which parts of a work are not to be read as irony, "learning where to stop" as one of Booth's chapter titles has it. In this chapter Booth gives five handicaps to understanding or detecting irony: • Ignorance - the irony is presented in a context unfamiliar to a reader, which could be cultural, generational, or any number of milieus that the reader does not share with the author or the intended audience, and with which he is unfamiliar. • Inability to Pay Attention - Booth's examples are of readers encountering irony in a format, such as a newspaper article, that normally does not require the kind of attentive reading that would be given to a work of literature. • Prejudice - the reader does not share or is opposed to an author's point of view, either the ironic message itself, or its intended "reconstructed" meaning. • Lack of Practice - either inexperience in reading irony in general or unfamiliarity with generic conventions whose violation may point to irony (this seems to fall equally well under "Ignorance"). • Emotional Inadequacy - Readers who are "either too ready to emote or too resistant to emotional appeals". In the last sections of the book, Booth deals with texts that go beyond "stable irony" into "unstable irony", where it is impossible to reconstruct an ironic passage into a "correct" statement of an author's position (the only specific examples here are some passages from The Man Without Qualities, and a Howard Nemerov poem, "Boom!"). Beyond "unstable irony" lies "infinite instability", ironic works in which there is no "knowing where to stop" because every attempt at reconstruction or negation leads to further irony; Samuel Beckett is the prime example given here.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-03-18 00:00:00 ROBERT BANNERMAN Turns out that rain on your wedding day is not ironic, but saying "like rain on your wedding day" definitely is.