Tag: Irony

• November 21, 2012

  Coming to earnestness

  The slow youth are dim, dim-witted, and droll; they remain there and get decent jobs. The clever ones are boundlessly sarcastic, for they have discovered how to stretch and bend their voices and twist their faces. They can say one thing, mean the opposite, and make themselves ugly in the bargain. But sarcasm is only…
• November 19, 2012

  Giving an honest self-inventory; or, how to be post-ironic

  The literary scholar Christy Wampole has called ours an “ironic age” in which “directness has become unbearable to us,” and in “How to Live Without Irony,” her New York Times Stone essay that appeared in this Sunday’s Review, she provides some clues for how we could live in a post-ironic manner.  These clues include saying what…