Ironic Distance Research Articles

White Things: Form, Formalization, and the Use of Prosody

Abstract: The limited prosodic literacy of revamped formalisms perpetuates the whiteness of lyric reading. By prizing ironic distance and elevating the critic as form’s discoverer, the concept of poetic form reinscribes racialized value judgments even where critics hope to valorize nonwhite poetic strategies. Formalism should instead attend to the history that gave poets their sense of form. Nonwhite poets mark how this process of formalization, through which forms become abstracted and bear value, consistently entails racialization. They prompt us, I argue, not to form but to prosodic details whose contingency and phenomenological complexity suspend codes of formalist reading.

#Sportsball anti-fandom as identity performance on X: The case of Australian Football League Women's (AFLW)

This article identifies a novel form of sports anti-fan identity present amongst X (formerly Twitter) followers of The Australian Football League Women's (AFLW) competition – #sportsball fans – whose nascent attachment to women's Australian Rules football is publicly performed as an ironically detached becoming-a-fan-ness, often rooted in a self-identified, pre-existing aversion to both sport and sports fandom. The term #sportsball serves as a shorthand for these types of new fan identities, for whom ironic distancing and expressions of surprise at their sudden affective attachment to football serve as a bridging device for traversing different textualities, for protecting the curated online self, and for managing expectations within pre-existing online communities. Identified via a corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) analysis of 71,332 posts drawn from official match day hashtags for the AFLW's inaugural 2017 season, #sportsball fans represent a significant contribution to our understanding of mediated fan practices and online identity construction.

A Restored Perspective

The recent retrospectives of Edward Yang’s cinematic oeuvre in Taiwan and North America have provided long-awaited access to his most overlooked works such as Du li shi dai (1994) and Ma jiang (1996). The last two films of his to undergo restoration, while seemingly uncharacteristic of Yang’s usual style, exhibit a remarkable consistency in his experimentation with various juxtapositions of sound, image, thought, and emotion. This essay explores how these satirical works yield fierce critiques of the pervasive materialism and the absence of independent thinking. In foregrounding dark comedy and ironic distance, these films offer timely ruminations on the difficult tensions and complex dynamics between individuals and society, and between tradition and modernity.

“Taking Comedy Seriously”: Humour in Lisa McGee’s Girls and Dolls

Laughter in the midst of tragedy can be one of life’s most disturbing, cathartic and enlightening experiences, a maxim experienced in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, one of the most painful periods of Irish history. Northern Irish playwrights were acutely aware of this when dealing with violence in their plays and so, however grim the events they depicted, the comic element was very much present. After the Good Friday Agreement, along with the change in the political situation in Northern Ireland, there was a generational change in the theatre. What seems to characterise this new wave is the ironic distance taken towards the sectarian divide and the consequences of the conflict on Northern Irish society, which is revealed above all in their use of humour. Lisa McGee, one of the most important representatives of the new generation thanks to the popularity of her television series Derry Girls, had already shown her maturity in her 2006 play Girls and Dolls, performed by Tinderbox the same year. McGee mixes the tragic and the comic to present the terrible consequences of childhood trauma alongside the violence of the late Troubles, while raising questions about guilt, the meaning of friendship and the subtle ways in which violence affects us. This article aims to analyse the different uses of humour employed by McGee to deal with tragic episodes and their theatrical effect, drawing on the existing research on humour in literature and McGee’s own observations given in an interview with the author on 3 March 2023.

Practices of Planetary Relationality in Colum McCann’s Apeirogon

For a number of critics, what we are witnessing in postmillennial Anglophone fiction is an attempt to do away with postmodern posturings of ironic distance and ethical non-commitment, and a renewed interest in questions of authenticity, empathy, responsibility and solidarity. According to Christian Moraru, one of the keenest chroniclers of contemporary culture, the shift is rooted in an understanding of the world as an interconnected system of relationality, which the critic discusses under the headings of cosmodernism and planetarity. Moraru locates the premise of this evolving cultural project in its ethical call for “a new togetherness, for a solidarity across political, ethnic, racial, religious, and other boundaries” (Cosmodernism 5), but recognizes it as leaving its imprint on the aesthetic and thematic choices made by contemporary authors. The aim of the paper is to analyze Colum McCann’s 2020 novel, Apeirogon, as indebted to this planetary vision of relationality. In particular, my intention is to trace the impact of this mindset on the narrative structure and the imaginary of the novel.

Avant-Garde and Kitsch in María Blanchard’s Neo-Cubism

Abstract The exceptionality of the women artists who achieved recognition within the circles of the avant-garde in the first decades of the twentieth century involved a number of performative strategies to avoid the risk of being confined to the category of ‘women painters’. The case of María Blanchard, a Spanish painter integrated in the School of Paris, exemplifies the problematics faced by women working in the avant-garde. Her trajectory from synthetic Cubism to neo-Cubist figuration follows the pattern of many of her male contemporaries working under the sociopolitical and market pressures in the post-war period, but the simultaneous assimilation of and ironic distance from the prevailing aesthetic ideologies is a distinctive feature of her style shared by other women artists. As Cubism became mainstream and began to lose its subversive power, Blanchard’s interest in challenging conventional artistic discourses and hierarchies found expression in kitsch aesthetics.

Don Quixote Unbound

Abstract Comics adaptations of literary classics often struggle to step out of the shadow of their model. This article explores how the recent adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote by German comics artist Flix transposes the Golden Age classic to a contemporary German setting, updating the story to speak to some of postmodern society's concerns. Flix's approach is marked by an ironic distance from his textual and pictorial sources, which he repurposes without losing sight of the Spanish novel's story arc, character constellation, and narrative devices. The adaptation restores the original comicality to a classic that has mostly been read as a tragic story. While the adaptation inscribes itself into Germany's cultural fabric, it proposes a Don Quixote that transcends traditional notions of clearly delimited, monolithic national cultures.

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s ‘Explication de quelques termes de marine’ (1773)

Abstract Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Voyage à l’île de France (1773), his first publication, contains near its end a curious segment which has received scant critical attention. This ‘Explication’ undertakes to elucidate maritime terms used in his travel narrative. Such short alphabetical glossaries, constituting in effect a subgenre of the nautical dictionary, appear in other voyage accounts of the period. But Bernardin begins by announcing that he has added to his explications of terms ‘des étymologies’, which are moreover ‘point sçavantes, mais conformes à l’esprit du peuple […] qui donne le nom aux choses’. This article argues that these allegedly popular etymologies, largely invented by Bernardin (who invokes Rabelais), are in the main to be read as ludic and satirical. Playing with ‘the body of the word’, employing fragmentation and punning, they mock both erudite and demotic derivations of terms. But the etymologies of the people also show that names contain their own meaning, establishing a comic Cratylism. The playful mode of this early piece allows Bernardin to adumbrate daring ideas while keeping them at an ironic distance. Taken seriously and attributed to Providence, the notion of an immanent signification in language, as in nature, exhibited to humankind, will be developed in later works.

Jim Crow Networks: African American Periodical Cultures

Jim Crow Networks: African American Periodical Cultures

‘An eye more penetrating than other men's’: Finding the Recherche's Narrator in a World of Experts

This essay presents the Recherche's narrator as an expert in a world of experts. Considering previous scholarship on the sociological knowledge present in Proust's novel, I imagine the pursuit of this knowledge as characterizing its narrator, distinguishing him from the other specialists who populate the pages of his récit. Drawing on the work of Gil Eyal, I read this récit as displaying a marked attention to the ‘networks of expertise’ in which these other experts make their knowledge effective. The récit's language, meanwhile, provides information on the network of expertise in which the narrator himself must operate to assume the social position of expert. Ultimately, I argue that thinking about the narrator and his writing in terms of expertise allows us to ironize the narrator's knowledge about the social world. From this ironic distance, the Recherche becomes not a vehicle of such knowledge but an experience of it.

АВТОБИОГРАФИЯ И "ВЗРЫВ": СПОСОБЫ ВОЗВЕДЕНИЯ И ПРЕОДОЛЕНИЯ ГРАНИЦЫ МЕЖДУ АВТОРОМ И ГЕРОЕМ (ПОВЕСТЬ Ж.-П. САРТРА "СЛОВА")

This article attempts to define the boundary between the author and the hero, which is declared as the leading intention in J.-P. Sartre’s autobiographical novel “Words”. The boundary – category, as one of the central ones in the semiotics of culture, seems to be a convenient tool for analyzing the autobiographical narrative, a conventionally borderline literary genre, and is understood as an area of collision of two different spheres – nature and culture. The boundary that does not separate the text from the reference which he describes, and as a consequence the image of the author or character from the Author-Creator, but connects them. The article identifies such boundary markers as: theatricalization of the life experience, ironic distance as a technique, reflection on the achievable limits of the truthfulness in an autobiographical narrative and on the content of individual memory, the use of cultural memory as an explanatory context. Summarizing the article conclusions are drawn about how the explicit contouring of the boundary allows the author to distance himself from personal experience, but not completely exclude himself from the written text and preserve documentary as a certain quality.

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

Laughing at Architecture: Architectural Histories of Humour, Satire and Wit

Laughing at Architecture: Architectural Histories of Humour, Satire and Wit

Preaching to the Unconverted: The Third Man (1949) as Historical Resource for Exploring the Topic of Americans in Vienna, 1945–1955

Abstract Classic but by no means “timeless,” Carol Reed’s 1949 British/US co-production The Third Man is also a fascinating historical document about the Four Power occupation in Vienna after 1945. In this article I would like to use the film to focus upon the US occupation in particular and the perception of the role of Americans in postwar Austria. A look at the plot, the production history, and a sample of the German-speaking reception will demonstrate that the film’s ironic distance to the United States was a major part of its appeal to European audiences. Moreover, this distance was elegantly camouflaged through an innovative multilingual script that ultimately helped to reconcile German-speaking audiences to the US occupation rather than deepening “anti-Americanism.” Along with its ironic distance to the Americans, the film’s creative use of Austrian actors, music, and locations without the slightest association with war crimes or complicity with criminal actions during the war ultimately led to its paradoxical high standing as both a “mirror” of postwar reality and “timeless classic.”

‘My graphological self-therapy’: scenes of writing and identity in Empty Words, by Mario Levrero

ABSTRACT This article reflects on the scenes of writing present in Empty Words (2019), a novel by Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero. In particular, it analyses scenes in which the protagonist writes about the very act of writing, either as a therapeutic process—with a certain ironic distance, since he tries to correct aspects of his personality while improving his calligraphy—or as a way of confirming his identity as a writer. Writing practice in this and other works by Levrero takes on an important place, where the act of writing is always something to problematize. Levrero was a renowned Latin-American writer and teacher of creative writing in whose work, which is just beginning to be translated into English, it is possible to see how he understands writing as an eminently concrete, quotidian, and identitarian practice.

Haupt postromantyczny? O czterech prozach i dwóch wierszach

The article is devoted to the relationship between Zygmunt Haupt’s prose and the romantic worldview, more precisely to the references to Juliusz Słowacki’s works clearly visible in Haupt’s prose. The issue, which has been previously pointed out by other researchers, required verification by means of close analysis of the specific kind of game that Haupt plays with Słowacki’s texts: Beniowski, Lilla Weneda, the poems Do pastereczki… (To a shepherdess…) and Patrz nad grotą… (Look, above the grotto…), and a fragment of Raptularz (Notebook). Seemingly simple references turn out to be part of a design of making a modern attempt at challenging the incommunicable by means of referring to both Słowacki’s text and his biography, together with an ambiguous, and suspended between repetition and ironic distance, attitude towards the romantic diagnoses of existence. Haupt’s prose, referring to many other traditions as well, presents a Mannerist creative design in which the romantic tradition plays a significant role, yet is not the only point of reference.

An assessment of the relationships between ball flight results, impact factors, and golf performance

PurposeThe aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between golf players’ performance, impact factors, and ball flight results with individual clubs when performing a full swing.MethodsThe study involved 9 amateur golfers who performed a full swing test with 4 different clubs (short, middle, long iron, and driver) and then played a tournament round of golf. The players’ performance was assessed by handicap and by game statistics from the tournament. The ball flight results were based on the resulting carry distance and the resulting side deviation from the target line. The impact factors were the initial ball speed, the club head speed, the smash factor, the face angle, the club path, and the face to path. Relationships between the players’ performance, impact factors, and ball flight results were investigated.ResultsA significant relationship was found between the resulting ball flight distance and handicap for long iron (<i>r</i> = –0.85; <i>p</i> < 0.01) and driver (<i>r</i> = –0.9; <i>p</i> < 0.01). Conversely, the resulting ball flight side deviation from the target line correlated with handicap in short iron (<i>r</i> = 0.78; <i>p</i> = 0.02).ConclusionsBall flight distance of long iron and driver and ball flight side deviation of short iron are key attributes of performance. The results suggest that in order to improve long term performance, players should aim for maximal distance with drivers and long irons (high smash factor) and for maximal accuracy with short irons (low face angle).

What is the “lite” in “alt-lite?” The discourse of white vulnerability and dominance among YouTube’s reactionaries

This article examines the discourse of “alt-lite” YouTube personalities in a North American context, with a focus on how whiteness is understood and represented. It argues that, despite their self-presentation as color-blind conservatives, these figures are firmly embedded within white supremacist ideology. A qualitative approach to content analysis is adopted to excavate the logics underlying these videos and to highlight the rhetorical tools at work. By framing themselves as the vulnerable targets of progressive movements, “alt-lite” personalities have helped to revive and legitimize a discourse of white victimhood. Their videos emphasize the historic dominance of “white culture” while bemoaning the current and future vulnerability of white people in a politically correct, social-justice-oriented world. Ultimately, the article argues that “alt-lite” figures are united by a set of mitigating rhetorical strategies, which are used to temper and obfuscate their reactionary views. These strategies include performatively aligning with one minority group to denigrate another; highlighting personal relationships with non-white people and knowledge of non-white cultures; embracing a color-blind worldview purportedly rooted in the civil rights movement; and maintaining ironic distance when espousing more overtly hateful racial stereotypes. The adoption of these strategies by right-wing micro-celebrities should not deter scholars and civil society groups from acknowledging when those same figures traffic in white supremacist rhetoric.

Reading “Guillelme l’Amïable”: Hypertextuality and La Prise d’Orange

The Old French epic poem La Prise d’Orange (late 12th-early 13th c.) systematically treats the conventional motifs, narrative patterns, characters and style of the chanson de geste with a comedic irreverence and an ironic distance that have led it to be labeled “the courtly parody of an epic,” but the text remains fundamentally organized by the generic paradigm from which it pointedly deviates. In Genettian terms, the Prise’s dominant hypertextual operation is travesty, which burlesques a prestigious text or story by recasting its characters and action in a ridiculously incongruous style—here, the narrative and rhetorical style associated with courtly discourse. The Prise cultivates a somewhat anxious enjoyment of its subversion of epic norms by thematizing the “folly” of its protagonist, Guillelme, whose absurd impersonation of a courtly lover casts doubt upon his legitimacy as an epic hero and the Prise’s “authenticity” as a chanson de geste. However, satirical transformation is ultimately reincorporated into the genre’s conservative narrative and ideological frameworks in a manner difficult to grasp through Genette’s system for lack of adequate distinctions between satire’s various possible ideological functions and stakes.

Deflationist Caprice: “Imperfections” in the Sculpture of Leon Podsiadły

This article is an attempt to define the ambiguous specificity of artistic deflation in the sculpture of the Wroclavian artist Leon Podsiadły. At the outset, the author describes the principle of deflationist art and proposes a method of approach. She then discusses the “imperfections” within Podsiadły’s sculpture, the main manifestations of which include the use of common materials and mundane objects, secondary anti-mastery, and dememorization. These features coexist with well-thought-out composition, the inventiveness of the choice-making artist, and the creative fascination of unconventional artistic qualities, to which deflationist unlearning adds a unique slant. Seen from this perspective, Podsiadły’s deflationist caprice persuasively affirms the elasticity of the oscillation between the optics of modernism and postmodernism that defines his art. This oscillation can be seen, for instance, in those among his sculptures that were inspired by his stay in Africa in 1960s; in his “erotic” compositions; and in his installations of the 2010s in which he used the ready made. His “reductive” artistic experiments testify to a need for ironic distance; they individually gravitate toward the transgressive avant-garde and at the same time respond to the current trend of deskilling in art.