Abstract
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schlegel developed an influential theory of irony that anticipated some of the central concerns of post-modernity. His most vocal contemporary critic, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, sought to demonstrate that Schlegel's theory of irony tacitly relied on certain problematic aspects of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's philosophy. While Schlegel's theory of irony has generated seemingly endless commentary in recent critical discourse, Hegel's critique of Schlegelian irony has gone neglected. This essay's primary aim is to defend Hegel's critique of Schlegel by isolating irony's underlying Fichtean epistemology. Drawing on S⊘ren Kierkegaard'sThe Concept of Ironyin the final section of this essay, I argue that Hegel's critique of irony can motivate a dialectical hermeneutics that offers a powerful alternative both to Paul de Man's poststructuralist hermeneutics and to recent cultural-studies-oriented criticism that tends to reduce literary texts to sociohistorical epiphenomena.
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