Behler, Ernst. Ironie and literarische Moderne. Paderborn: Schoningh, 1997. 336 pp. DM 68 hardcover. Only Ernst Behler could have written the book on irony, and this is it. His earlier books on include Klassische Ironie, Romantische Ironie. Zum Ursprung dieser Begriffe (1972), but of course Behler began publishing on in the 1950s when he became editor of the Friedrich Schlegel edition. This book resembles a literary psychogram of Western culture since Socrates, using as the defining trend of literary consciousness. Behler possessed the enormous reading and critical capacity to construct a picture that includes all periods and major figures as they relate to irony-ancient, modern, and postmodern. As recently as 1765 was narrowly defined as a figure of speech in which one expresses the opposite of what is said (7). Toward the end of the 18th century, however, the concept had expanded to include the author's emergence from the poetic structure of his fiction, sein Durchbrechen and Transzendieren der Dichtung, worm sich eine Problematisierung der literarischen Mitteilung anzeigt (8). Schlegel's conscious restructuring of the classical, rhetorical concept of represents a modern innovation (9), even though Schlegel and the Romantics did not use the term Romantic irony themselves (10). In his foreword Behler identifies the major players in the development of modern irony: Schlegel, Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, T. Mann, Walser, LukAcs, Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida. He then delivers detailed chapters including most of these figures. The book concludes with a discussion of in the schools of New Criticism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism and Deconstruction. The first chapter details the shift from classical to romantic irony. The earliest classical model is Socrates's position on the Delphic oracle pronouncing him the wisest of men, to which he responds that he knows nothing (22). For Aristophanes meant the opposite of urbane thinking and was a pejorative; this changes with Plato, who shows Socrates ironically feigning ignorance (23). Behler cautions that the Platonic view of cannot be limited to Plato's use of the term, but must include the Platonic dialogue itself, which is ironic in its conception (26). There follows a discussion of in Socrates, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and QuintilHan. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, both allegory and metaphor were of greater significance than (38). Stirrings of modern emerge in Dante and Luther (38, 39), and Swift lends a decidedly bitter tone to (40). By the time Schlegel identified in Diderot, Sterne, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, he was also thinking of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister in ironic terms (40, 41). Chapter two treats techniques of romantic before Romanticism, since the Romantics applied the term not to themselves, but to the ages they considered to be romantic, namely, the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (67). Here Behler discusses Don Quixote, Orlando Furioso, Canterbury Tales, Tristram Shandy and Apuleius's Metamorphoses, and works by F Schlegel, Tieck, Grabbe, Heine, Stendhal, and Lord Byron. The name was attached to these various expressions because all suggest a stylistic and spiritual kinship with Socrates, whose mocking questions and argumentation, though seemingly without continuity and purpose, nonetheless return dialectically and continue the narrative (65). The third chapter on the consciousness of literary modernity emphasizes that Bacon, Pascal, and Descartes injected modernity with the idea of scientific progress (70); while the course of scientific and philosophical progress was seen as infinite, human creativity was not (71-72). Behler thus establishes the borderline for a fully developed consciousness of modernity at the beginning of the Fruhromantik, where poetry, literature, and art were seen for the first time as a constant progression or innovation (72). …
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Jul 31, 2020
Julio Salvador Salvador 
Open Access
