ENGL 104

Verbal irony: statement in which the meaning that a speaker implies differs sharply from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed 

  • Stable irony: the author’s real meaning is clearly implied

  • Unstable irony: having difficulty determining the author’s real views or even determining whether they are being ironic or not

Sarcasm

  • The crude and taunting use of apparent praise for dispraise

  • More bitter than verbal irony

Dramatic irony

  • Words spoken by a character in a play/narrative who, because of their ignorance of present of future circumstances that the audience is aware of, does not realize how the words apply to their situation; the reader has the knowledge and the character does not

Structural irony

  • Sustains a duplex meaning and evaluation throughout the work, such as a naive protagonist or narrator whose viewpoint is consistently wrong, shared by neither author or reader

Situational irony

  • Events turn out contrary to expectation yet are perversely appropriate

Cosmic irony

  • Occurs when situational irony is associated with the notion of fate/deity, manipulating events so as to “frustrate and mock” a character in a literary work

Romantic irony

  • The narrator of the story builds up an illusion of reality but then shatters the illusion by revealing that he is arbitrarily making up the story as he goes

Narrative irony

  • A function of disparity among the points of view; those of the characters, the narrator and the audience (and sometimes between the narrator and the author)

Uncanny

  • class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar

  • something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it

  • when something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs

3 Types of Uncanny

  • The infantile anxiety: the castration complex (the fear of damaging or losing one’s eyes); factors of silence, solitude and darkness

  • The phenomenon of the double: Characters looking alike and/or sharing mental processes (telepathy), the subject identifying himself as or with someone else, the repetition of the same features, crimes, names, narcissism products as reflections in mirrors/shadows

  • The animistic conception of the universe: the idea that the world is populated with the spirits of dead people, connected with the fear of dead bodies and the return of the dead as ghosts; demons and the state of being possessed (ascribing evil intentions to living people and discerning the signs of madness)

  • the effacing of the distinction between reality and imagination: physical objects possessing magical powers, along with the power of the spoken word (to kill, to heal, etc.); “when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes” (in magical practices etc.); the prompt fulfilment of wishes