Forms Of Irony Research Articles

Uncovering echoic mechanisms in verbal irony comprehension

Abstract Whereas some studies suggest that ironic praise necessitates a longer processing time than ironic criticism, others posit that the two are processed at comparable speeds. We hypothesize that the presence of an echoic antecedent within the preceding context may at least partially account for these conflicting findings. To investigate this matter, we analyzed reading times and accuracy stemming from two types of contexts: echoic and non-echoic. Our results demonstrate that ironic criticism was judged to be more ironic in both echoic and non-echoic contexts, while ironic praise was rated as more ironic in an echoic context than in a non-echoic context. Additionally, echoing contexts facilitate the comprehension of ironic criticism, but cause ironic praise to be processed more slowly. There was also an observed asymmetry between the two forms of irony. Ironic criticism demonstrated high accuracy and was rated as more ironic than ironic praise. Furthermore, ironic criticism was read faster in an echoic context, whereas performance was similar in a non-echoic context for both types. These findings suggest that echoing context affects ironic criticism and ironic praise differently, implying that distinct mechanisms may be at work in understanding irony in echoic and non-echoic contexts.

현진건 단편 소설의 아이러니 양식과 그 현실인식

Hyun Jin-geon’s short stories have been discussed through a “realism-perspective”, but in the matter of “realism”, they were devalued when compared to realist works. The modern colonial era was an era in which double and triple contradictions were revealed and absurd situations were reproduced by imperialism and capitalism. Rather than accurately and realistically portraying this reality, Hyun Jin-geon ironically expresses the opacity caused by the inconsistency of language and ironically embodies the reality in a way that breaks the inevitability of the incongruity of causality. While securing an objective distance free from subjectivity, they recognize the contradictions and absurdities of various realities. Therefore, as we sense this inconsistency and incongruity, we experience irony in Hyun Jin-geon’s short stories. This paper explores how irony works, focusing on a few of Hyun Jin-geon’s representative short stories how he recognizes the reality of modern colonialism. Irony has historically been interpreted in various ways as a literary form. However, there are generally two forms of irony that have been consistently agreed upon in the process: ‘rhetorical irony’ and ‘situational irony’. In this way, Hyun Jin-geon rescues irony in his work, objectively revealing the various contradictions and absurdities of colonial modernity at a distance. Subsequently, Hyun Jin-geon reveals his true value and position as a writer and his characteristic representation of reality.

Humour as an information-influencing resource in mass media

The purpose of this paper is to show how humour is involved in creating effective media communication. The research method is a stylistic analysis of the media text through establishing the manifestations of humour in its compositional components – paratext, metatext, and intratext. The paper reveals the manifestations of two types of irony – ridicule and banter – in these text components. It is established that banter is a means to demonstrate the event distantly, to reduce unnecessary pathos in the speech of top public officials, and to emphasize public contradictions indirectly. Language markers of banter are most often found in the metatext. In such forms of irony, veiled references and hints are expressed which require an additional cognitive effort to understand. The feelings that motivate irony are hidden behind a mask, and are the opposite of the implied ones expressed in the text: for example, indignation is hidden behind surprise and bewilderment. Banter is typical of business mass media, where every event is transmitted distantly. Ridicule is characteristic of sociopolitical mass media. It is expressed in the conflict charge of the media text – the desire to discredit the object of speech, and often acts as a means of transmitting alienation, demonstrating categorical opposition of one’s position to another’s. Ridicule is created by the saturation of negative-evaluative means, most often manifested in the expression of anger and indignation, which determine ridicule. The text markers of tonality, evaluation and degree of indirect expression form the basis of reading the modality character – i.e. badinage.

Living with paradox through irony

In organizations, people have to deal with and manage a variety of paradoxes, and this may involve using discursive means such as irony. However, we still know little about the association between irony and paradox in concrete organizational interaction. Our analysis builds on an ethnographic study of journalists and producers at YLE, the Finnish public service broadcaster. On the basis of our analysis, we argue that contradictions are co-constructed with three different forms of irony: inversive, subversive, and dramatic. This leads us to develop a more general model that helps explain how irony may be used and may move discussions from one phase to another. Especially, we show how irony puts contradictions into context through management strategies called ‘connecting.’ Through ‘connecting’ management strategies organizational members give voice to, energize and embrace poles that are in opposition in contradictions. By so doing, our analysis supplies a missing piece to our understanding of how organizational members deal with paradox and adds to research on irony in organizations.

Playful and gendered use of insults and criticisms in romantic couples’ everyday banter

The present study focuses on the gendered and playful ways that insults and criticisms are formulated by young adult romantic couples in their natural interactional contexts. A discourse analytic approach was used to examine how twenty young adult heterosexual romantic couples (ages 19–26) use gender to playfully pursue insults and criticisms in their natural ecological contexts. This study is motivated by a burgeoning arena of research that suggests that conflicts among contemporary young adults may often be sociable in nature, and thus may not pose the kind of adversarial face-threats for young adult intimates in the ways that would be traditionally expected. The analyses demonstrate three conspicuous patterns. First, that the vast majority of the insults and criticisms are gendered. Second, that nearly all of the excerpts involve the creative use of various forms of irony, laughter, rekeyings, abrupt non-sequiturs and topic shifts to allow the gendered insults/criticisms to appear playful. And finally, the analyses show how these gendered and playful insults/criticisms are consequential as preliminaries for affiliation.

War and Sentimentalism: Irony in Voltaire's Candide, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm

period from the mid-1750s to the mid-1760s was marked by the Seven Years’ War, a proto-nationalistic military conflict that saw a death toll of over a million, as well as the rise of sentimentalism, an intellectual movement based on the principles of sympathy, benevolence, and humanity. The clash of these two historical phenomena finds expression in some of the century’s most canonical works of fiction, including Voltaire’s Candide, ou l’optimisme (1759), Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67), and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, oder das Soldatengluck (1767). All three of these texts use various forms of irony (verbal, situational, structural, and historical) to explore the tensions and affinities between the inhumanity of the Seven Years’ War and the affective ethics of sentimentalism. In all three cases, it is not a satiric irony that destroys its target, but a productive irony that probes truth through a dialogic interaction of said and unsaid. Ultimately, the ironic treatment of the relationship between war and sentimentalism emerges as a backdrop for a discussion of the nationalist and cosmopolitan paradigms.

Two layers of overt untruthfulness

This philosophical-pragmatic paper discusses several forms of irony which rest on other figures of speech contingent on overt untruthfulness, namely the figures arising as a result of flouting the first maxim of Quality. It is argued that an ironic implicature may be piggybacked on another implicature, called “as if implicature”, originating from flouting the first maxim of Quality occasioned by metaphor. Metaphorical irony, which is subject to the irony-after-metaphor order of interpretation, exhibits a number of manifestations depending on the nature and scope of irony, and the scope of the subordinate metaphor. On the other hand, rather than giving rise to an as if implicature distinct from the irony-based one, hyperbole and meiosis, which are inherently evaluative, most typically overlap with ironically evaluative expressions, promoting meiotic and hyperbolic irony, frequently (wrongly, as will be claimed here) considered by researchers to rely on flouting Quantity maxims. However, cases of independent use of hyperbole or meiosis in ironic environment are also possible. Such invite two levels of untruthfulness and two implicatures.

A statistical analysis of satirical Amazon.com product reviews

A corpus of 750 product reviews extracted from Amazon.com was analyzed for specific lexical, grammatical, and semantic features to identify differences between satirical and non-satirical Amazon.com product reviews through a statistical analysis. The corpus contained 375 reviews identified as satirical and 375 as non-satirical (750 total). Fourteen different linguistic indices were used to measure features related to lexical sophistication, grammatical functions, and the semantic properties of words. A one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) found a significant difference between review types. The MANOVA was followed by a discriminant function analysis (DFA), which used seven variables to correctly classify 71.7 per cent of the reviews as satirical or non-satirical. Those seven variables suggest that, linguistically, satirical texts are more specific, less lexically sophisticated, and contain more words associated with negative emotions and certainty than non-satirical texts. These results demonstrate that satire shares some, but not all, of the previously identified semantic features of sarcasm (Campbell & Katz 2012), supporting Simpson’s (2003) claim that satire should be considered separately from other forms of irony. Ultimately, this study puts forth an argument that a statistical analysis of lexical, semantic, and grammatical properties of satirical texts can shed some descriptive light on this relatively understudied linguistic phenomenon, while also providing suggestions for future analysis.

L’ironie, la litote et l’hyperbole dans les chroniques humoristiques du journal Le Monde

Our goal is to analyse the role played by irony, litotes and hyperbole in humour. Our theoretical perspective is that of discurse analysis. We study the different forms of irony in journalistic texts as well as their relation with litotes. We also study the forms and functions of hyperbole, depending on whether it magnifies the positive or the negative. Furthermore, we propose to divide the figures of speech analysed in this paper into three broad categories of polyphonic play : parody, irony and caricature. We take our examples from a sample of newspaper columns published on the French newspaper le Monde between 2000 and 2003 and between 2006 and 2009.

Irony comprehension: A developmental perspective

This paper considers what light experimental work on the development of irony comprehension can shed on the relation between echoic and pretence accounts of irony, and how theoretical debates about the nature of irony might suggest fruitful directions for future developmental research. After surveying the results of developmental studies of three distinctive features of verbal irony – the expression of a characteristic attitude, the normative bias in the uses of irony and the ‘ironical tone of voice’ – it considers how echoic and pretence accounts of irony might explain these results. On the theoretical side, it argues that echoing and pretence are distinct mechanisms which can be used independently of each other, and that verbal irony necessarily involves echoic use, but does not necessarily involve pretence. On the experimental side, it argues that a range of disparate phenomena including hyperbole, jocularity, understatement and rhetorical questions, which are generally treated as forms of irony in the developmental literature, display none of the distinctive features of irony in most of their uses, and are not inherently ironical. However, these phenomena are worth investigating in their own right, and new theoretical accounts and experimental paradigms are needed to prise them apart.

Children's understanding and production of verbal irony in family conversations

This study examined how children use and understand various forms of irony (sarcasm, hyperbole, understatement, and rhetorical questions) in the context of naturalistic positive and negative family conversations in the home. Instances of ironic language in conversations between mothers, fathers, and their two children (M(ages) = 6.33and4.39years) were recorded during six 90-min observations for each of 39 families. Children's responses to others' ironic utterances were coded for their understanding of meaning and conversational function. Mothers were especially likely to ask rhetorical questions and to use ironic language in conflictual contexts. In contrast, fathers used hyperbole and understatement as frequently as rhetorical questions, and employed ironic language in both positive and conflictual contexts. Children also showed evidence of a nascent ability to use ironic language, especially hyperbole and rhetorical questions. Family members used rhetorical questions and understatement proportionately more often in a negative interaction context. Finally, older siblings understood irony better than younger siblings, and both children's responses revealed some understanding of ironic language, particularly sarcasm and rhetorical questions. Overall, the results suggest that family conversations in the home may be one important context for the development of children's use and understanding of ironic language.

Mémoire et autorité: Chateaubriand ironiste

The article attempts to highlight Chateaubriand's ideological and æsthetic ambivalence as he responds to the transformation of religious and political authority with the advent of democracy. Five forms of irony are identified in his work, from the Essai sur les révolutions to the Mémoires d'outre-tombe and the Vie de Rancé . They express the varying representations he gives of what is both irreconcilable and inescapable in his historical experience.

Victor Hugo, un temps pour rire (review)

822 Reviews VictorHugo, un tempspour rire. By Joe Friedemann. Saint-Genouph: Nizet. 2002. 204 pp. ?22. ISBN 2-7078-1265-x. Five of the seven chapters of Joe Friedemann's study of the comic in six novels and one volume of rhapsodic essays (Han d'lslande, Notre-Dame de Paris, Les Miserables, William Shakespeare, and L'Homme qui rit) previously appeared as articles, between 1987 and 1995. Only the introduction and conclusion, and two chapters (on BugJargal and Le Dernier Jour d'un condamne; on the poetry), are new. The introduction recalls that in 1840 Hugo personified four separate elements in his personality, including 'Maglia, le rire' (p. 7). Friedemann claims to adopt a phe? nomenological approach (p. n), but lacks most ofthe philosophical background ordinarily associated with that method. He then presents four tables of word frequencies (forms of laughter; forms of irony,sarcasm, satire, and modes ofthe comic; associated ideas, particularly relating to performance; and total frequencies of all such words in each text treated). Unfortunately, he overlooks the essential procedure in such studies, which is to compare the frequency with which each key term appears in the target texts with its relative frequency in a large general sampling of written French (for a model see N. F. Cunen, 'Le gouffreet l'abime de Baudelaire: themes fondamentaux de Baudelaire', Travaux de linguistique et de litterature, 15 (1977), 109-39). The chapter on Han d'lslande usefully lists comic details (pp. 25, 37-39). The discussion of Bug-Jargal comments brieflybut eloquently on the dark laughter of the sadist and ofthe rebel (p. 60). But Friedemann never explains whether and how the modes of the comic in Hugo are part of a universal, national, or period typology. In what respects is his fictive laughter original? A look at Byron's poetry would have begun to clarify these questions. The chapter on Les Miserables (pp. 81-105) offersonly brief, passive descriptions of scenes involving laughter, without conveying any notion of the dry wit conveyed by the reversal of moral judgements, on which much of the persuasive force of Hugo's humanitarian masterpiece depends. After a pedestrian beginning, the first half of the chapter on L'Homme qui rit makes a few interesting observations on surprise and hyperbole in laughter (pp. 133-40). And the chapter on Hugo's verse usefully summarizes some of the poet's reflections on the polemical value, moral status, and epistemological function of irony and laughter (pp. 178-83). Friedemann seems a learned, cultured person. But his thought proceeds by enumeration and free association. His skimming treatment changes subject so often that one would almost think he suffers from an attention deficit. He fails to develop ab? stract ideas or sustain chains of reasoning. One finds many studies of the comic listed in his bibliography, but when he analyses the comic, he mainly confines himself to quoting or paraphrasing Hugo's remarks. He proposes few original insights into the texts he discusses, and he does not synthesize. Owing to these limitations, the reader is likely to find Friedemann's book disappointing. Michigan State University Laurence M. Porter Prosper Merimee: Plays on Hispanic Themes. Trans. and ed. by Oscar Mandel. New York: Peter Lang. 2003. viii + 205pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-8204-6308-6. Thirteen works in dramatic form constitute a substantial part of Merimee's liter? ary output, but, as Oscar Mandel observes in his comprehensive introductory essay 'Prosper Merimee Playwright', the range of those recently published is narrow and few are performed. Those translated here are the two Ines Mendo plays, Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement, and L'Occasion (from the Theatre de Clara Gazul; he excludes three others as lightweight), together with La Famille de Carvajal. His essay makes ...

Oscar Mandel (review)

822 Reviews VictorHugo, un tempspour rire. By Joe Friedemann. Saint-Genouph: Nizet. 2002. 204 pp. ?22. ISBN 2-7078-1265-x. Five of the seven chapters of Joe Friedemann's study of the comic in six novels and one volume of rhapsodic essays (Han d'lslande, Notre-Dame de Paris, Les Miserables, William Shakespeare, and L'Homme qui rit) previously appeared as articles, between 1987 and 1995. Only the introduction and conclusion, and two chapters (on BugJargal and Le Dernier Jour d'un condamne; on the poetry), are new. The introduction recalls that in 1840 Hugo personified four separate elements in his personality, including 'Maglia, le rire' (p. 7). Friedemann claims to adopt a phe? nomenological approach (p. n), but lacks most ofthe philosophical background ordinarily associated with that method. He then presents four tables of word frequencies (forms of laughter; forms of irony,sarcasm, satire, and modes ofthe comic; associated ideas, particularly relating to performance; and total frequencies of all such words in each text treated). Unfortunately, he overlooks the essential procedure in such studies, which is to compare the frequency with which each key term appears in the target texts with its relative frequency in a large general sampling of written French (for a model see N. F. Cunen, 'Le gouffreet l'abime de Baudelaire: themes fondamentaux de Baudelaire', Travaux de linguistique et de litterature, 15 (1977), 109-39). The chapter on Han d'lslande usefully lists comic details (pp. 25, 37-39). The discussion of Bug-Jargal comments brieflybut eloquently on the dark laughter of the sadist and ofthe rebel (p. 60). But Friedemann never explains whether and how the modes of the comic in Hugo are part of a universal, national, or period typology. In what respects is his fictive laughter original? A look at Byron's poetry would have begun to clarify these questions. The chapter on Les Miserables (pp. 81-105) offersonly brief, passive descriptions of scenes involving laughter, without conveying any notion of the dry wit conveyed by the reversal of moral judgements, on which much of the persuasive force of Hugo's humanitarian masterpiece depends. After a pedestrian beginning, the first half of the chapter on L'Homme qui rit makes a few interesting observations on surprise and hyperbole in laughter (pp. 133-40). And the chapter on Hugo's verse usefully summarizes some of the poet's reflections on the polemical value, moral status, and epistemological function of irony and laughter (pp. 178-83). Friedemann seems a learned, cultured person. But his thought proceeds by enumeration and free association. His skimming treatment changes subject so often that one would almost think he suffers from an attention deficit. He fails to develop ab? stract ideas or sustain chains of reasoning. One finds many studies of the comic listed in his bibliography, but when he analyses the comic, he mainly confines himself to quoting or paraphrasing Hugo's remarks. He proposes few original insights into the texts he discusses, and he does not synthesize. Owing to these limitations, the reader is likely to find Friedemann's book disappointing. Michigan State University Laurence M. Porter Prosper Merimee: Plays on Hispanic Themes. Trans. and ed. by Oscar Mandel. New York: Peter Lang. 2003. viii + 205pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-8204-6308-6. Thirteen works in dramatic form constitute a substantial part of Merimee's liter? ary output, but, as Oscar Mandel observes in his comprehensive introductory essay 'Prosper Merimee Playwright', the range of those recently published is narrow and few are performed. Those translated here are the two Ines Mendo plays, Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement, and L'Occasion (from the Theatre de Clara Gazul; he excludes three others as lightweight), together with La Famille de Carvajal. His essay makes MLRy 100.3, 2005 823 two claims for Merimee's theatre. The first is for its seriousness: Merimee is nei? ther imitating nor parodying Spanish drama, but creating 'exuberantly original texts' (p. 34). The characteristic switch in the epilogue to the Clara Gazul plays from tragic to comic mode does not undermine their seriousness (any more than the ironic dis? tancing in the closure of several nouvelles), nor do its comic introductory letters in any...

Illness as Irony in Psychoanalysis

This chapter examines the ironic reversals found in many psychoan alytic interpretations, looking especially at their construal of the rela tionship between illness and agency. Freudian interpretations take two different forms, one associated with the current uses of illness, the other with its infantile origins, i argue that these two ways of reading illness draw their structures from the two most influential forms of irony in Western literature. Interpretations stressing the cur rent uses of neurotic symptoms follow a pattern laid down by rhetor ical irony, in which the ironist's seeming innocence or incapacity conceals a strategic aim. Those tracing neurosis to its infantile origins follow the pattern of dramatic irony; here the concern is with hidden forces shaping a victim's destiny.

The bicoherence theory of situational irony

AbstractSituational irony concerns what it is about a situation that causes people to describe it as ironic. Although situational irony is as complex and commonplace as verbal and literary irony, it has received nowhere near the same attention from cognitive scientists and other scholars. This paper presents the bicoherence theory of situational irony, based on the theory of conceptual coherence (Kunda & Thagard, 1996; Thagard & Verbeurgt, 1998). On this theory, a situation counts as ironic when it is conceived as having a bicoherent conceptual structure, adequate cognitive salience, and evokes an appropriate configuration of emotions. The theory is applied to a corpus of 250 examples of situational ironies gathered automatically from electronic news sources. A useful taxonomy of situational ironies is produced, new predictions and insights into situational irony are discussed, and extensions of the theory to other forms of irony are examined.

The bicoherence theory of situational irony

Situational irony concerns what it is about a situation that causes people to describe it as ironic. Although situational irony is as complex and commonplace as verbal and literary irony, it has received nowhere near the same attention from cognitive scientists and other scholars. This paper presents the bicoherence theory of situational irony, based on the theory of conceptual coherence (Kunda & Thagard, 1996; Thagard & Verbeurgt, 1998). On this theory, a situation counts as ironic when it is conceived as having a bicoherent conceptual structure, adequate cognitive salience, and evokes an appropriate configuration of emotions. The theory is applied to a corpus of 250 examples of situational ironies gathered automatically from electronic news sources. A useful taxonomy of situational ironies is produced, new predictions and insights into situational irony are discussed, and extensions of the theory to other forms of irony are examined.

First-Person Engaging Narration in the Picture Book: Verbal and Pictorial Variations.

This article explores what effects pictures have on the concepts of immediate-engaging, distant-engaging, and distancing first-person narration. The basic premise is that a pictorialized (as opposed to an illustrated) narrative involves different dynamics of engagement than a purely verbal narrative. The effects of these dynamics are explored in Louise Fitzhugh's I Am Five, Kay Thompson's and Hilary Knight's Eloise, Jeannie Baker's Where the Forest Meets the Sea, Michael Bedard's and Les Tait's The Clay Ladies, and in Ellen Raskin's Nothing Ever Happens on My Block. In all of these books the verbal narrative is immediate-engaging, but the pictures vary. Some are third-person limited, which allows for various forms of irony; others are third-person objective, which largely eliminates irony and a broader perspective of what is going on; while others are interspersed with moments that are, or come close to being, first-person viewpoints and therefore draw the reader in more actively.

Rethinking Reading: The Novel and Cultural Stratification

Rethinking Reading: The Novel and Cultural StratificationWilliam Ray In the course of the last decade or so we have come to think of the novel no longer just as a reflection or product of social and cultural reality, but as an active instrument in the construction of that reality. Critics as different as Michael McKeon and Nancy Armstrong have accustomed us to take for granted that early fiction played a central role in the articulation and management of subjectivity through the formations of selfhood, ethical régimes, and models of sociality it disseminated.1 Yet within this general rethinking of fiction as an agent of historical change, far less attention has been devoted to the ways in which it might have altered the practices of reading through which novels operate. A shift from "intensive" devotional reading to "extensive" literary reading has been proposed to account for the way in which reading evolved more generally; but few have questioned how the protocols and assumptions of fiction reading in particular might have changed in concert with the novel's circulation of new models of the self.2 By and large we assume that eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels operate primarily 1 Michael McKeon, Origins ofthe English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). This article was completed during a Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina which was funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities, both of which organizations I would like to thank for their generous support. 2 Exceptions to this tendency include John Bender's study of the narrativization of authority in Imagining the Penitentiary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Claude Labrosse's analysis of reading in Rousseau, Lire au xvme siècle: La Nouvelle Héloïse et ses lecteurs (Paris: Editions du CNRS and Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1985); and Dorothea von Miicke's study of literary pedagogy, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion: Generic Innovation and the PedaEIGHTEENTH -CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 2, January 1998 152 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION by depicting behaviour with which readers identify. Fictional narratives amend and reconfigure subjectivity by providing characters the reader can imitate or sympathize with—or be repelled by. There is of course historical justification for this assumption, since that is precisely the mechanism which most eighteenth-century authors advance in defence of their works. Yet it seems inconsistent to assume that the genre of the novel could reconfigure subjectivity in any substantial way without simultaneously changing the way people related to cultural artifacts such as novels. Moreover, given the vigour with which the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras deployed culture as a political instrument , we might assume a significant evolution in the way people related to cultural institutions in general, including the novel.3 Quite independently of such arguments, the substantial formal differences that, in the French tradition especially, separate the eighteenth-century novel from its nineteenth-century counterpart would seem to entail a wholesale revision of reading protocols. Anonymous third-person narration, free indirect discourse, a preponderance of material description, forms of irony that render the author's attitude towards the protagonists undecidable— all of these clearly require different assumptions and operations on the part of the reader than do first-person or epistolary accounts claiming to represent a real person's exemplary experience.4 I will argue here that new paradigms of reading did indeed develop in conjunction with the reconfiguration of subjectivity, and I will outline the emergence of one such paradigm in the works of an author who gogical Project in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1991). Robert Darnton, "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity," in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 215-56, challenges the shift to extensive reading and suggests some general ways in which the novel changes the way people respond to texts. For the difference between intensive and extensive reading see Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürgerals Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland 1500-1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974). For other approaches to this...

The Concept of the Comic in Esthetics

The comic is one of the principal esthetic categories; it unites the multifaceted experience of the social mind as it assimilates and cognizes the world, particularly the social world, on the basis of axioms of common sense, or even of public opinion about these axioms. Boldly violating the laws of logic and the verisimilitude of images, of normal connections and notions, and playing upon these violations, the comic nonetheless remains firmly on the side of common sense. The comic is inexhaustible in its nuances — from light merriment and entertainment to malicious ridicule and satire, from gross farce to subtle forms of irony and humor.