Double Irony Research Articles

Saikaku's Evanescence

Abstract: This essay explores how Ihara Saikaku's new form of fiction— ukiyo-zoshi —both adapts and adopts traditional Japanese aesthetics. Saikaku's Five Women Who Loved Love (1686) is a paradigmatic example of the modern conception of ukiyo , which inverts the traditional Buddhist sense of ukiyo , written with a different character, to express the ephemeral, often erotic pleasures of the floating world, rather than sadness in the face of its transience. I argue that, though the modern pleasures of ukiyo are the drivers of the plot, the imagery and the traditional aesthetic pleasures associated with the Buddhist sense of the transience of a floating world run throughout the stories. Saikaku's characters are often presented as avatars of classical characters and in turn they often end up generating additional stories. Characters and stories alike are nodes in a cycle of infectious stories, versions of earlier stories that seed further stories and so transmit the evanescent pleasures of love in a self-conscious circulation of stories. The older resonance of the floating world sounds through its modern meaning. Saikaku ironically invokes the Buddhist significance of the floating world, but he may also ironically suggest the limitations of its modern pleasures. Saikaku's modernity inheres in this double irony.

Unpacking ‘baby man’ in Chinese social media: a feminist critical discourse analysis

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the proliferation of the new term ‘baby man’ has an impact on reconstructing established gender relationships and resisting China's authoritarian political power in a highly-censored online environment. This study employs feminist critical discourse analysis to investigate how Chinese feminism adopts the discursive construction of ‘baby man’ and how they echo the complex historical and sociocultural backgrounds through a case study of 43 posts containing ‘baby man’ on Chinese social media. The finding suggests that the term ‘baby man’ is employed in discursive strategies, namely, double irony, the blunt resistance against both gender and power relationships that deconstruct the heteropatriarchal gender norm through the mother – son female gaze and contempt for the nation's past and current population policy. It argues that despite perennial censorship, these three discursive strategies help reconstruct the extant gender hierarchy backed by conservative Confucianist ethics and represent a grassroots challenge to the political authoritarianism indoctrinated by the state.

A Tale of Two Cadences

Charles Tomlinson Griffes was a visionary American composer at the turn of the twentieth century who synthesized highly diverse elements into a new artistic voice. This essay explores two instances of musical irony in Griffes’s oeuvre. “The Vale of Dreams” introduces a new tonal center at the end, which casts doubt on the overall structural role of the recurring bass pedal. Griffes’s use of irony in “Prelude #3” has a more critical character in that he questions underlying theoretical assumptions about scale-degree identity and the traditional concepts of consonance and dissonance. In addition, the double irony awakened in the final chord undermines the model of binary form and the aesthetic principle of closure upon which that model is based. As a result, the third prelude constitutes a kind of musico-philosophical challenge, an aesthetic exclamation point that invites listeners to reconsider traditional definitions of interval quality, tonality, and formal closure.

The XXL Survey

Aims. We show how the XXL multiwavelength survey can be used to shed light on radio galaxies and their environment. Methods. Two prominent radio galaxies were identified in a visual examination of the mosaic of XXL-North obtained with the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope at 610 MHz. Counterparts were searched for in other bands. Spectroscopic redshifts from the GAMA database were used to identify clusters and/or groups of galaxies, estimate their masses with the caustic method, and quantify anisotropies in the surrounding galaxy distribution via a Fourier analysis. Results. Both radio galaxies are of FR I type and are hosted by early-type galaxies at a redshift of 0.138. The first radio source, named the Exemplar, has a physical extent of ~400 kpc; it is located in the cluster XLSSC 112, which has a temperature of ~2 keV, a total mass of ~1014 M⊙, and resides in an XXL supercluster with eight known members. The second source, named the Double Irony, is a giant radio galaxy with a total length of about 1.1 Mpc. Its core coincides with a cataloged point-like X-ray source, but no extended X-ray emission from a surrounding galaxy cluster was detected. However, from the optical data we determined that the host is the brightest galaxy in a group that is younger, less virialized, and less massive than the Exemplar’s cluster. A friends-of-friends analysis showed that the Double Irony’s group is a member of the same supercluster as the Exemplar. There are indications that the jets and plumes of the Double Irony have been deflected by gas associated with the surrounding galaxy distribution. Another overdensity of galaxies (the tenth) containing a radio galaxy was found to be associated with the supercluster. Conclusions. Radio Galaxies can be used to find galaxy clusters/groups that are below the current sensitivity of X-ray surveys.

Whose Real? Encountering New Frontiers in Westworld

This article explores the themes of psychoanalysis and Lacanian theory discernible in the HBO version of Westworld (HBO 2016- ). This article argues that it is productive to examine the series through a psychoanalytic lens, especially through Jacques Lacan’s concept of the Real. In an examination of Season One of the series, we argue that this new show – given its focus on psychological landscapes and trauma – requires a deeper textual analysis to uncover similar Lacanian themes. These are themes signposted by the quite literal depictions of therapy sessions shown throughout the season. At the heart of the show lies a double irony about the human and non-human characters in the show. Westworld’s robotic characters are gripped by the complexity of their memories: memories pre-programmed, easily adjusted and changed by the scientists running the park. Then, we see the actual human figures of the show in hot pursuit of violent sexual desires, thoughtlessly enacting free plays of desire without consequence and the conscientious interruption of the superego or the ‘Law’. To explain this, we firstly provide an introduction to the contextual origins of the three psychoanalytic orders (or triad) developed in Lacan’s writings, particularly looking at Seminar II of 1954-1955. Using this framework, we then focus on a textual analysis of four key characters in the series, and how each negotiates journeys through these conceptual/spatial zones that delineate some ‘encounter with the Real’. Finally, we argue that the text’s complex narrative devices become allegorical for the viewer him- or herself as a lost figure in search of answers, allowing a meta-analysis of key themes of the show.

The Curious Transformation of Boy to Computer

The Curious Transformation of Boy to Computer

Five Readings of Euthyphro

Euthyphro is frequently dissected for its philosophical dilemmas regarding the relation of the god’s love to holiness, and whether justice is a part of the holy or the converse. But how can we understand the dialogue as a literary whole? This paper exhibits five ways in which it can be so understood: Euthyphro is the subjectivist patsy (both a literalist and divine command theorist) playing against Socrates’s natural law-like moral objectivity; the dialogue is elenchic because the dilemmas are true; the dialogue is elenchic, but the dilemmas are false; the dialogue produces a double irony; the irony is in the existence of the dialogue.

Chaucer the Forester:

Chaucer the Forester:

Reflections on the New Historicism

In this essay, I describe my practice of historicism circa 1986 by setting it into a field of distinctions and affinities gathered from the annals of intellectual history, literary history, critical theory, and critical practice. Under “critical practice,” I set my own developing thought over the past two decades, the new resources on which it draws, and its overall shape as an immanent critique of commitments informing the ideas and methods of my earliest work. I offer this vantage on what was lacking in my historicism in order to bring out a double irony: one, that my critique of my work goes deeper than the many attacks on it, and, two, that in surpassing that practice of historicism, I see it realized and validated.

Romanticism displaced and placeless

Displacement, deriving mainly from the circumstances of the first modern world war, is an abiding notion in European Romanticism. It can take the form of a fragmentation of psychic identity through loss of nationality, as we find in Ugo Foscolo, or of the exile’s split between nationalist identities, as exemplified by Germaine de Staël’s Corinne. But in the literature of Great Britain one also finds a powerful resonance from concrete historical circumstances: the huge numbers of Britons involved in military deployment overseas, whose effect is a leitmotif in Wordsworth’s early writing, are offset in complicated ways by the highly visible presence of displaced French émigrés in England, tellingly represented by Charlotte Smith. On the other hand, this endemic sense of being uprooted allows for a kind of double irony, as writers in their reaction to the turmoil of displacement attempt to find a way of transcending nationalist strictures. For women, without political standing, this can mean liberation into thinking of themselves as “citizens of the world.” In the case of already empowered men, we find Shelley attempting to create a mythos around a circle of creative geniuses who inspire one another’s art in “islanded” circumstances. Even more radically, Byron attempts to cast himself within an existential liberation, exploring wandering as the very mode of existence.

Reframing the Luddites: Materialist and Idealist Models of Self in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley

Early in Charlotte Bront?'s Shirley, heroine Caroline Helstone criti cizes her cousin, mill-owner Robert Moore, for behaving as your living cloth-dressers were all machines like your frames and shears (72). Coming on heels of her declaration to him, there is something wrong in your notions of best means of attaining (72), Caroline's analysis of Robert's faults of manner resonates with larger debate in 1840s over sufficiency of utilitarianism, and materialism more generally, to ensure the greatest happiness for greatest number of British men and women. Central to this debate were materialist and idealist conceptions of individual character and its formation: for materialists, character was at once determined by circumstances and devoid of any metaphysical dimension; for idealists, by contrast, character was product of individual choice and could not be fully understood apart from inef fable spiritual ends. From Caroline's idealist perspective, her cousin's materialist attitude towards his workers he neither expects nor wishes for them to love him signifies screw to be loose some where . . . out of her reach to set it right (73). However, there is a double irony in her critique: first, her disapproval is, itself, registered in mechanistic terms she thinks he has a screw loose; and second, if Robert devoted to his workers even half of fierce protectiveness that he reserves for his grim, metal darlings (384), if, in other words, he treated his workers more like his machines, then Caroline wOuld have significandy less ground for her disapprobation. The vulnerability of Caroline's idealist position to materiahst tropes

The double irony of health-insurance regulation

The double irony of health-insurance regulation

A double irony: the originality and influence of John F.C. Turner

John F.C. Turner deserves a different reputation than that which he has acquired. Over the post-war period, Turner has been the most influential writer about housing in the developing world. Most writers suppose that in the 1960s, as an advocate of self-help, he changed the way researchers thought about housing, and that in the 1970s his ideas influenced the World Bank to initiate major sites-and-services projects. In fact, Turner was not the first to advocate self-help; his warm reception indicates that his ideas were widely shared, and less revolutionary than many suppose; his most original argument about dwelling control had limited influence. This irony was compounded at the time that the World Bank adopted aided self-help, for Turner was eloquently critical of this form of policy. Turner's contribution was to bring Latin American ideas about squatter settlements to the attention of urban scholars around the world. He added his voice, and the squatter experience, to a growing chorus of western writers who spoke of the rights and capacities of the urban poor. He built on an intellectual and planning tradition, expanding our notion of self-help and systematically exploring its implications.

John Dewey and American Psychology

John Dewey is always included as critical player in the development of psychology in America. But his relationship to this development is nearly always misunderstood. I argue that there is a double irony in this. Contrary to the received opinion, Dewey played no role in the development of American psychology. The confusion depends upon the view that American psychology got its mind from Darwin and dealt with a mind in use. It also depends on the assumption, related to this, that Dewey was a powerful advocate of the view that the social sciences would produce the kind of positivist knowledge that could establish rational control over society and history (Ross, 1991). In part I, I reconsider Dewey's place in the development of American psychology. In part II, I argue that Dewey came to believe that psychology ill served what became his primary intellectual goal, that philosophy must address not the problems of philosophy, but the problems of humankind. Instead of getting answers from scientific psychology, the problems he was interested in addressing would respond to a new conception of inquiry, work which culminated in his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. The second irony then is this: Having abandoned even the more refined forms of behaviorism, the cutting edge of current work in psychology is so-called cognitive psychology. But, remarkably, not only does Dewey's Logic give us prophetic insights into the most fruitful of these approaches, an ecologically oriented, biologically grounded cognitive science, but shows us decisively why symbolic AI models must fail.

Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue

Many of the best dramatic monologues are sustained exercises in what W. H. Empson calls double irony, the simultaneous endorsement of contradictory codes.' Because the speakers in such monologues are pulled two ways at once, their incapacity to pursue wholeheartedly any single course of action makes them unsuited for their roles. Far from alienating us, however, the indecision and vulnerability of Browning's Andrea del Sarto or his lover in Two in the Campagna often make us oddly intimate with them. Since the essence of a deception is to mask the truth, a liar has to possess the truth he is hiding before he can lie. In bad faith, by contrast, the truth is hidden from the liar himself: his deception is no longer grounded in a consciously embraced truth. anguish of Browning's Andrea del Sarto or his austere Victorian Prufrock in A Toccata of may merely be a mask of anguish. In order to escape the genuine anguish of acknowledging his guilt for crimes against King Francis and his parents, Andrea may only pretend to be disturbed by Lucrezia's refusal to stay at home with him. And in order to avoid the despair of facing his own mortality, the chilly moralist in A Toccata of may merely pretend to be distressed by Galuppi's failure to commemorate a less frivolous beauty in his music. In each case bad faith takes the form of unconsciously lying to oneself. Though a lie posits the duality of deceiver and deceived, bad faith implies the unity of a single consciousness. Whereas the priest lies to the woman in Browning's Andrea del Sarto lies to himself. In bad faith the deceiver and the dupe are one and the same person. As Jean-Paul Sartre explains, to be in bad faith I know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived . . . Better yet I must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully.2 Chaucer's Pardoner, Andrea del Sarto, and many of Browning's casuists both know and do not know they are liars. As self-deceivers they are more dangerous than a simple liar like the priest in Browning's monologue, The Confessional, because if

Harpers Ferry:An Examination of the Theory of “Objective Conflict” in the Plays of Barrie Stavis

Barrie Stavis is not your run of the mill playwright. Some consider him the only playwright today writing serious plays embodying a social, political and historical awareness. And yet, respected as he is by those who have come in contact with his work, he remains something of a forgotten artist, unknown to the public, even theater-goers. As Arthur H. Ballet says in his remarks on Stavis in Contemporary Dramatists, He is a 'pro.' Methodical, organized, enthusiastic, and almost pristinely professional as he is, there is a double irony in the fact that he has never really had a hit on Broadway.' Of course, a Broadway hit is not the only way to establish a successful career as a playwright. There is, however, a discrepancy between Stavis' lack of impact on the general theater-going public and the respect that his work receives from a number of thoughtful critics. This is particularly noteworthy in light of Ballet's assertion that, To non-Americans ... Stavis represents the clearest and 'most' American voice of the time. As perhaps is still true of O'Neill, Stavis seems most American to those who are least American, and he seems most 'universal' to his American audiences.2

A Single Capacity in The Beggar's Opera

The stock device of the play is a double irony like a Seidlitz powder, piling a dramatic irony onto what was already an irony. This forces one to read back a more complex irony into the first one, and the composure of language of the characters makes us feel that the speaker took the whole sense for granted. ... The trick of style that makes this plausible is Comic Primness, the double irony in the acceptance of a convention. ... No sentence of the play is quite free from this trick.... 1

The French Workers' Movement since 1945

That three books about the French labor movement in the 1970s and 1980s all have the word crisis in the title can hardly be a coincidence. The prolonged re cession, which began with the oil embargo of 1973 and shows no signs of abat ing, found the French labor movement ill-equipped in terms of strategy and unable to devise appropriate policies. The result has been the demobilization and disillusionment of the working class and the decline of trade union organi zations despite the victory of the left in the elections of 1981. There is a double irony in this outcome. Part of the failure of the French labor movement, as these books assert, was due to its excessive reliance on politics. French unions pursued a maximalist strategy, disdaining compromise and failing to devise a policy appropriate to the economy because they believed the crisis to be polit ical and its solution dependent upon radical change on the governmental level. Yet when radical political change appeared imminent in the elections of 1978 the French Communist party shrank back from the prospect of power and adopted tactics which resulted in the defeat of the left. Moreover, the PCF continued its divisive policies through the elections of 1981, weakening itself in the process and insuring that when the Socialists did win they would govern without needing the Communists, who were relegated to a subordinate role. Thus the unions failed their workers doubly, on the shop floor and, through

Ironist and Moralist: The Two Readers of Tom Jones

Ironist and Moralist: The Two Readers of Tom Jones WILLIAM PARK Commenting on William Empson’s essay “Tom Jones,” C. J. Rawson remarked that “the overall effect of the essay is misleading... in so far as it suggests that the main doctrinal points are made by means of an essentially evasive irony rather than by what is often an em­ phatic explicitness.”1 Rawson was speaking of sexual morality, and perhaps we have all come into complete agreement on that subject. Yet on another “doctrinal” point—the relationship between the plot of the novel and a providential design—there have appeared in recent years two contradictory and opposed readings. On the one hand we find Ian Watt, Martin Battestin, Aubrey Williams, and Henry Knight Miller, who see the well-ordered plot as being somehow related to Fielding’s vision of a well-ordered universe.2 As Watt says, the plot “reflects the general literary strategy of neoclas­ sicism; just as the creation of a field of force makes visible the universal law of magnetism, so the supreme task of the writer was to make visible in the human scene the operations of universal order.”3 On the other hand we discover Sheridan Baker, John Preston, Leo Braudy, and David Goldknopf, who see the plot as an artifice, a kind of irony, a recognition of confusion, or a failure having no real significance in itself but possibly working as an aesthetic device that enables Fielding 233 234 / WILLIAM PARK to achieve other ends.4 According to Braudy, “In Tom Jones Fielding asserts that the most obvious and artificial structure (the plot) is also the most liberating. Because it does not claim to be necessary, it therefore allows the material the freest play and gives the truest and most relevant representation of life. ” Braudy further claims that since only the Man of the Hill, Partridge, and Blifil believe in Providence, “the providential view in Tom Jones is at best supererogatory and at worst ignorantly or meretriciously self serving.”5 I believe this conflict may to some extent be resolved if we return to Empson’s concept of “double irony” in Fielding and the two readers which that irony involves.6 According to Empson, Fielding poses as the man of the world, the one who winks tolerantly at sexual mis­ behavior. This is his first irony, made at the expense of stuffy moralists. The second irony, however, trips up the worldly reader when either chastity or sexual license no longer appears to be a joke. Thus Fielding moves closer to a Richardsonian view, though one which has become highly qualified. Now I would argue that the plot ofTom Jones is one double irony.7 As narrator, Fielding on numerous occasions insists that the world is governed by accident and Fortune, that virtue is not rewarded by happiness in this world (XV, i), and that he will not intervene to help Tom (XVII, i). He appeals directly to the realist like Braudy and seems to be laughing at the theologically orthodox like Battestin. As he says, he is confined to “natural Means alone” (XVII, i).8 At first, the hodgepodge of events seems to support this first irony, but as order and happiness begin to emerge out of the random and episodic world, as Tom’s fortunes are reversed, the comic action contradicts this particu­ lar narrative viewpoint and reveals the second irony, namely that Fortune is but Providence improperly understood. At this point the realist who accepted all the statements about chance, accident, For­ tune, and history as absolute has been revealed to be as literal-minded as his moralistic counterpart. By a careful counterpoint between statement about the plot and the plot itself, Fielding has by the last book reversed his initial position; and as he withdraws from direct commentary, the novel as a whole affirms an orthodoxy which be­ comes more interesting and acceptable than the simpleminded version preached by the prigs. Instead of talking about the plot ofTom Jones as Two Readers of Tom Jones / 235 an artifice, then, it might be more appropriate to notice how Fielding’s pretense at being a naturalistic narrator is an even greater artifice...

Preface

Preface An eighteenth-century editor might well begin this preface by sauci­ ly vaunting the Bill of Fare in the hope of titillating the readers’ appetites so they would seek to feast their eyes on the following pages of the proposed menu. However, the editor of this volume ofStudies in Eighteenth-Century Culture lacks the desire to retain the readers from the delights of a bountiful repast, the presumption to entice them to consume a menu which in itself provides sufficient incentive for care­ ful reading and gratification for the discriminating palate, and finally, both the inclination and the talent to imitate Fielding for more than one paragraph. The articles appearing in this volume were selected from papers presented at national and regional conferences of the American Soci­ ety for Eighteenth-Century Studies. They cover a wide range of topics and disciplines. To summarize the diversity of the contents would be a task similar, in a microcosmic way, to attempting to reduce the com­ plexities of the many facets of the Enlightenment expressed by artists, authors, and philosophers in both the Old and New Worlds, to a simple formula. It is perhaps ironic to note that in this very diversity lies a key to the fundamental unity of this volume, a dissonant one­ ness, a parallel for which can be discovered in the shadowy recesses of the Enlightenment, in the contrast between the rational and the irrational, progress and tradition, reality and imagination, truth and illusion. The eighteenth century can be divided in a system of philosophical and artistic dichotomies. Inherent in this organization xi xii / Preface of incongruous couples (whether they represent thesis and antithesis or action and reaction) is the revelation that, living in a state of constant flux, man is uneasy and seeks to resolve the seeming paradoxes of divergent ideas and of living in an imperfect present prescribed by tradition while thinking of perfection and aspiring after the future. The authors whose essays appear in this collection have all per­ ceived some aspect of this duality. They have observed its physical manifestations—the presence of two classes (elite and popular) and two traditions (oral and literate)—and its philosophical expression— liberty and reason vs. oppression and irrationality, the mechanical world vs. utopia, actualism vs. catastrophism, the theories of the Physiocrats and those of the Encyclopedists, or the debates between the neptunists and the vulcanists. The authors have also explored the literary or artistic expressions of duality: type vs. individual, fancy vs. judgment, statement vs. demonstration. The authors have sought to elucidate the nature of these incongruous pairs by explanation, situa­ tion or resolution. The use of papier-mache in the construction of Walpole’s castle is explained as the architectural metaphor for the conflict between illusion and reality. The problem of nature, seen at once as a coy yet seductive maiden, a promiscuous yet chaste consort, is linked to a series of opposites—freedom/restraint, capturer/captive, definer/defined—and is situated in the basic conflict of male/female. The establishment of colleges in America is seen as the solution for the social and moral oppositions of civilization vs. barbarism and virtue and knowledge vs. vice and ignorance. Voltaire’s alphabetical writings are the resolution of possible conflict between form and ex­ pression. The eighteenth-century woman, affected by Locke’s empiri­ cism in her thought and by patriarchal doctrines of traditional wom­ en’s roles in her lifestyle, provides an example of a human irony. Fielding, both a natural historian and a believer in Providence, recon­ ciled wish and belief with double irony in his writings. By positing two readers (self and other), two interpreters, two classes, or two modes of thought, some of the authors in this volume have sought to refine and interpret these antitheses. Rochester is seen to unite all roles in one being: male/female, conquistador of sex/servile Preface I xiii slave of love. Steme the writer and Sterne the editor become one in their serious concern for brilliant style and precise diction. Other authors have hesitated before models which split the world so neatly and have reacted to them by presenting triads, as in the essay on Kant, or...