Bombs and Other Exciting Devices, or the Problem of Teaching Irony

Abstract

In the representation of power, the ironing board has long served as a sign of women's work, connoting the relegation of the female to the relative powerlessness of the home. Irony, on the other hand, has traditionally been discussed as a trope of the powerful, to be mastered by the rulers of language and the state. Fielding's irony, deployed at Mrs. Slipslop's expense, depends for its comic effect on our recognition of this fact, that is, on our recognition of the incommensurability of the domains of ironing and irony. Unfortunately, the hierarchical implications of this distinction are still with us, sometimes where we might not expect them to be. Specifically, in the college writing course-the course charged with teaching the rhetoric of reading and writing-one might expect students to be empowered culturally by learning to master the trope of the powerful. Yet this is all too obviously not what occurs. If our textbooks are any indication, few of us spend any-or any significanttime teaching irony. Those teachers who have presented an essay dependent on irony to their freshman writing classes probably already know how much difficulty students typically have in interpreting ironic meaning. Students may miss not only the joke of such essays, but also their critical force. Perhaps because of this, few of us encourage students to use irony in their own writing. Following Richard Ohmann's lead in examining the politics of what we do teach in the writing classroom, I would like to speculate on the politics of not teaching irony. For the decision to teach or not teach irony is a political gesture in a way that the decision to teach other tropes, such as metaphor, for example, is not. Irony is not simply a trope among tropes, not simply a neutral and purely formal device. Unlike other tropes, it defines a political relationship between the user and the audience being addressed or excluded. Even while provoking laughter, irony invokes notions of hierarchy and subordination, judgment and perhaps even moral superiority. It is subversive. And it challenges some of the principles of Lori Chamberlain has published articles on translation theory and postmodern literature. She is