Tragic Irony Research Articles

Irony, Analysis and Text Interpretation

Stylistic devices create special atmosphere giving additional hues to the reading. Writers use different stylistic devices to express the idea and lead the reader to the answer. The style that writers use varies from author to author that makes reading enjoyable and exciting. While analyzing the text, readers think about the hidden meaning, implied idea, thus trying to read between the lines. The topic of our discussion is irony. Irony is an implied discrepancy between what is said and what is meant. There are different types of irony: verbal irony, irony of situation, dramatic irony and tragic irony, each having their value and importance. Irony can be used by the writer in a variety of forms for a variety of purposes. It finds its expression in the use of words conveying the opposite of their literal meaning. Using irony by the writer may create different effects on the reader. To begin with, it can be used to show folly in an amusing way. On the other hand, it can take the form of wounding criticism causing anger and hatred. Finally, it can be used to depict the situation showing all tragedy and sadness it involves. Thus, effects created by irony make the reader see through the surface meaning to the true purpose of writing.

Oedipus’ Freudian slips: language, kinship and tyranny

This paper deals with the linguistic aspect of tragic irony in the Oedipus Rex. It begins with the observation that several ambiguous expressions in the play telegraph their double meaning through various kinds of linguistic slips. It is argued that these slips occur on three distinct levels: semantics, syntax and pragmatics. There follows an analysis of several examples under each of these three headings. The paper concludes with the observation that when it comes to the question of Oedipus’ familial relationships and the legitimacy of his rule in Thebes, language itself fails the hero and defies his attempts at controlling it.

Tragedy, Tragic Irony, and War: A Dialectical Approach

Tragic irony may mean the dramatic irony in scripted tragedy (tragic play). The audience can predict the regrettable outcome on the stage before the main characters do. I focus on non-scripted events and their tragic aspects. Colloquially, disaster and tragedy are synonyms, but this is misleading. Tragedy means a disaster in special circumstances, which I suggest we can read ironically. This is to say, as I argue, tragedy is necessarily ironic. I read Richard Rorty on irony and Hegel on tragic irony and cunning of reason. My aim is to redescribe real-life conflicts by using the dialectical understanding of irony and tragedy. Following Rorty and Hegel, I apply their theories of identity to real tragedies. The validation of the theory of literary criticism is a practical matter. My key illustrations come from modern wars; wars are and cause disasters, and thus I expect we can discover cases of tragic irony in factual and counterfactual contexts. Sometimes, the losses and suffering would have been meaningless regardless of the war’s outcome. The winner suffers, but it would have been better not to win. The losers suffer, but it would not have been better had they won. A total defeat would have been better than a conditional one. These redescriptions show the ironic differences between disaster and tragedy in non-scripted contexts—and all these cases are controversial.

The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward ed. by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner

Reviewed by: The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward ed. by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner Matthew Karp The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward. Edited by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner. Foreword by Edward L. Ayers. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 276. $38.95, ISBN 978-0-19-086395-1.) In the early 1950s, C. Vann Woodward released a burst of scholarship whose intellectual and political impact has probably never been equaled in southern history: The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), a field-defining survey; Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Boston, 1951), an influential monograph on the Compromise of 1877; “The Irony of Southern History,” his 1952 Southern Historical Association presidential address that was an iconic exploration of southern identity; and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1955), a subversive account of segregation’s origins that Martin Luther King Jr. is famously said to have called “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.” When Strange Career was published, Woodward was just forty-six years old. He worked actively for another four decades, giving lectures, writing essays, leading organizations, and training graduate students. Yet Woodward, at the peak of his powers, never produced another book of original historical research. It was not for lack of trying: across the 1960s and beyond, Woodward persevered with a number of book projects, chief among them a long-promised, much-discussed, and lucratively contracted narrative of Reconstruction. It never appeared. For biographers and close readers of his scholarship—a category that includes a fair portion of all southern historians since 1955—the interlocking stories of Woodward’s efflorescence and its eclipse retain intrinsic interest, above and beyond the rich content of the work itself. This volume of previously unpublished writing, skillfully edited and introduced by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner, sheds considerable light on both sides of the Woodward conundrum. It is principally drawn from two series of invited university talks Woodward delivered at the summit of his career: the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures, given at Louisiana State University in his scholarly annus mirabilis of 1951; and the Messenger Lectures on the Evolution of Civilization, given at Cornell University in 1964, as he attempted to shape his research into a book on Reconstruction. A 1969 lecture Woodward delivered at Yale University, on “The Problem of Failure in American History,” serves as a kind of coda. As Ring, Gardner, and Edward L. Ayers (who contributes a foreword) all note, Woodward’s interest in the idea of failure—during Reconstruction and across U.S. history— overlaid his own intellectual struggles with a kind of tragic irony that Woodward himself would have appreciated, if not exactly relished. [End Page 383] The lectures printed here easily justify the work of restoration undertaken by Ring and Gardner. Many of Woodward’s lavish talents as a historian are on display: his flair for arresting, sharply framed topic sentences—“Never in history had the franchise been conferred on a proletariat so utterly deprived” (p. 221); “The advent of Republicanism marked the advent of class politics in the South” (p. 225)—and his gift for compact characterization, marked by a telling anecdote, as when he introduces the unworldly antislavery prophet Theodore Dwight Weld, who “often had to go to the window to see whether it was winter or summer” (p. 61), or the formidable southern abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who announced their new religious commitments with a ceremony: “Then one solemn morning the sisters destroyed a set of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, which Angelina had purchased, according to Sarah, ‘before she was serious’” (p. 65). At his best, as in the irresistible Origins, Woodward’s sentences and characters together conjure a kind of narrative momentum seldom achieved by other great historians, even those whose interpretations we now find more persuasive. Enough hints of that mysterious alchemy are visible here, in this raw form, for scholars today to take note. When we read Woodward’s editors at Louisiana State University Press, contracted to publish the revised Fleming lectures, urging him to keep “coining the golden prose”—practically...

Desire, Death and Sexual Politics in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

This paper examines the interface of desire, sexual politics and death through a literary-critical study of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. The study focuses on the characterization of Emma which allows for a more in-depth and thorough exploration of her psychology vis-à-vis the concepts of desire and death. Firstly, the study extensively explores the Girardian models responsible for Emma Bovary’s desire within the novel. It brings out to the surface the models or mediators (such as romantic fictions, or fashion magazines, or the luxurious life of the rich) responsible for Emma’s desire. These mediators create a void or vacuum in Emma, which need to be filled. This, as the study has shown however, is difficult to do because of sexual politics. Flaubert here suggests that a woman’s desire ends only with death – a patriarchal creed that preordains woman to live without desire. Here, then, lies the intersection between Emma’s desiring pleasure and the instinct of death drive. Therefore, the study examines, from Jonathan Dollimore’s paradigm, the extent to which Emma Bovary’s desire, as portrayed by Girard, creates an “ideal” in her mind and causes her death. The implication of this is that a woman only ascertains a freedom from the trauma of unfulfilled desire in death, a tragic irony that surrounds Emma’s moment of departure from the world as a conscious being.

A Foretold Tragic Fate. Plutarch’s Literary Resources in the Presentation of the scene about the Death of Cleitus by Alexander (Plu., Alex. 50.1-6)

Despite his Platonic distrust of the didactic value of poetry, including the theater, Plutarch, as an accomplished biographer of characters whose life was full of dramatic situations, applies to their stories a deep-rooted knowledge of the literary strategies of Greek drama. No exception is the anecdote about the death of Cleitus by Alexander. Its plot begins with the king’s friendship with his general, a moment plagued with the ingredients that ancient Greek tragedy reserves for its heroes: Fortune and the fulfillment of destiny, inescapable for them, despite their knowledge of the future, as well as the pride of the hero, confident in the strength of his ideals; and, finally, the tragic irony with which the playwright seems to offer a happy ending, which makes the outcome harder. Plutarch always intervenes with great creative capacity in the presentation of these situations, sometimes transmitted by other sources. And he does it also when he introduces the episode that now concerns me, putting into play all the resources of his style. He thus designs a perfect scenario for the facts, now the discussion between Cleitus and Alejander and the death of the first by the second, adorned with religious references (omens, fortune tellers, unconsummated sacrifices, dreams, etc.) and whose main power is the destiny that, as in a tragedy, will be inescapable for the protagonist (Alexander) and for his antagonist and friend (Cleitus).

Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa By Delinda Collier

Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa By Delinda Collier

A Library of One's Own

A Library of One's Own

Disability and working-life citizenship

ABSTRACT This article explores disabled people’s stories of their working life experiences from a narrative point of view. We claim that the idea of full-time paid employment is the basis of full citizenship (working-life citizenship) and is a dominant narrative that affects disability policy. This study is theoretically informed by the model of narrative circulation (MNC), according to which people construct their stories in relation to culturally available and hegemonic narratives. We analysed work-related plot structures in disabled persons’ life stories, which were included in the life-story data corpus ‘Life of Disabled Persons in Finland 2013–2014’. By looking at these life stories in relation to the culturally available narratives, this study identifies four story types for disabled people’s working-life citizenship: 1) working-life citizenship as a hero story, 2) the tragedy of working-life citizenship, 3) the comedy of working-life citizenship and 4) working-life citizenship as tragic irony. The findings suggest that while paid employment is considered a major source of inclusion, the stories of persons with disabilities are not always heroic stories in which hero status is achieved. Such stories often remain untold and unheard. However, they need to be told and heard for the conditions of inclusion to be understood.

Creolizing the Nation

Creolizing the Nation

IRONIC ΗRYHIR TIUTIUNNYK (SOME OBSERVATIONS)

One of the most dramatic writers of the 2nd half of the 20th century Hryhir Tiutiunnyk was remembered by all his contemporaries who worked in the cultural sphere as a person endowed with a keen sense of humor, rare wit, and unique artistry (in various genres, both dramatic and comedic). This paper is a reflection on how in the works by Hryhir Tiutiunnyk, killed by the totalitarian system in 1980, the well-known dominants of “love and pain” are deepened by irony, in all the immensity of its shades and meanings. The writer did not use any words from the political lexicon but instead unmasked the totalitarian system by depicting (mostly through apt expressions and details) the behavior and destinies of people oppressed or destroyed by it. His irony is mild, lenient, or even somewhat sympathetic. In the stories reviewed in the paper, namely “Screw”, “Niura”, “The Feast in Memory of Markiian”, “The Son Has Arrived”, the mentioned nuances of the means of irony are used in rather complex, sometimes weird combinations (“The Literate”, “Laughter”), revealing the ardent indifference of the author who tried (sometimes successfully) to pretend to be an outsider – an unworried or even superior narrator. In such works as “The Feast in Memory of Markiian” and “Medal”, the death itself or its obvious approach causes the appearance of tragicomic elements. However, in the latter, the tragic irony is not related to the character, but to the props of the stage action, in which the people resembling mannequins represent the village and district authorities and pretend to award a starving man as “the best animal breeder”.
 Some of Hryhir Tiutiunnyk’s characters, as in the short story “Oddity” and the story “My Saturday”, rise to a sarcastic mockery of oppressors: the specificity of the Soviet-communist officials lies in the fact that they don’t even realize the absurdity of their activities, which lack any humanistic principles. The literary world of the writer, despite its seeming simplicity, is extremely complex in terms of inner subtleties of thoughts, emotions, and conflicts.

Matters of Empire in American Humor: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Matters of Empire in American Humor: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Matters of Empire in American Humor: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Matters of Empire in American Humor: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Nancy Beck Young. Two Suns of the Southwest: Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and the 1964 Battle between Liberalism and Conservatism.

Nancy Beck Young is not the first historian to recognize the 1964 presidential election as a watershed in the history of modern American politics. The contest between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson has been central to just about every study of partisan realignment, liberalism, or modern conservatism published during the past three decades. Goldwater’s status as a prophet of the New Right, despite the irony of his massive rejection at the polls in 1964, is well known and well chronicled. At the same time, scholars (and a host of liberal partisans) have long contemplated the tragic ironies of Johnson’s tenure in the White House: millions of voters rejected the conservative Goldwater in 1964, favoring instead Johnson’s vision for a “Great Society,” not to mention what many assumed was a safer, less reckless option for stable world leadership. Within a few years, however, Johnson’s untenable commitment to the mistake of the...

The COVID-19 Pandemic, Biogerontology, and the Ageing of Humanity

The World Health Organization designated the decade 2020-2030 as the “decade of healthy ageing”. It is a tragic irony that the year 2020 should begin with a pandemic that is so lethal for older persons. Not only are older persons the most vulnerable to COVID-19 mortality, but many of the mitigation efforts to slow the spread of the virus have imposed yet further emotional and mental health burdens on the most vulnerable among those over age 70. To help prevent future infectious disease mortality and suffering, as well as the profound health burdens from the chronic diseases associated with ageing, insights from biogerontology must become an integral part of global public health priorities. The timing is ripe for making the public health aspiration of developing an applied gerontological intervention a reality.

Remembering Emmett Till

Remembering Emmett Till

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by the famous Swiss literary scholar Emil Staiger and to present it to Ukrainian explorers for the first time. Due to the complex application of the historical-cultural, comparative, descriptive methods, the methods of linguistic-stylistic and figurative analysis, the authentic change of the traditional angle of interpretation has been identified: it eliminates the motif of the ancestral curse based on the Theban cycle of myths and shifts the emphasis on personal guilt. It is established that Staiger departs from the traditional explanation of category ??????? as �error� and interprets it as a deep cause of offense, which lies within ourselves, but is devoid of malice, which weighs all the consequences and pursues a specific goal. A �plastic Greek� perceives his guilt as destiny, and destiny differs from conscious activity. It is noted that the researcher distinguishes the work of Sophocles from a number of �tragedies of fate�, recognizing the oracle as a core element of dramatic tension creation. Moreover, the oracle is not interpreted as a symbol of blind reign of eternal fate, but only as a sign of infinite divine knowledge. Thus, the central conflict of the tragedy is the antagonism between Apollo and Oedipus, the god and the mortal: it is not a matter of showing that everything on earth is predetermined, but of distinguishing between infallible knowledge of god and limited knowledge of man and illustrating the gap between man and god. �Know thyself!� � know that you are a human, not a god � this famous aphorism can be considered the idea of tragedy, and Oedipus is the embodiment of the finiteness of human knowledge. It is stated that due to the motive of the court the whole tragedy is perceived as a model of Staiger�s dramatic style (observability of the action, brief description of the characters, conciseness of language). It is notable that the role of judge takes the protagonist himself and he finds the criminal in himself. So the movement returns to its starting point: the circle composition in �Oedipus the King� becomes a loop that is tightened around the neck of the hero. The interpreter names it �tragic irony�, which permeates the semantic outline of the work (especially the double meaning of the words of the characters) and it is manifested in each plot (the man himself fulfils the prophecy, trying hard to divert it). Staiger`s distinctive interpretation of the problem of freedom is emphasized: no matter how deceived Oedipus goes, he comes to admit his guilt and realize the need for punishment, and in the choice of punishment lies his freedom. Ultimately, Oedipus must be defeated in order to preserve the truth of the divine word. However, wilful acceptance of punishment is not a reconciliation of freedom (the hero fought against his fate) and necessity (he lost the fight against fate) in the classical sense, but rather it is related to the tragic emotions, which cause admiration.

The Political Economy of Pandemic Response: 3rd Quarter (Update)

This paper provides the 3rd quarter update to an earlier analysis of the record on the first six months of the U.S. public policy response to the COVID-19 epidemic, The conclusion remains crystal clear:The U.S. had one of the worst policy responses to the pandemic in the world, certainly among large, high-income democracies, including Asian (e.g., South Korea, Japan, Taiwan), European (e.g., Germany, Denmark, Finland, Norway), and other nations (e.g., Australia, New Zealand).The update has stronger findings based on new sources of data and analysis.Three months of recent data, a period that was particularly harsh in the U.S;More than doubling the number of data sources to over 350, which include reports of multinational and national public health and economic institutions, academic papers, trade association analyses, detailed accounts from investigative journalism, and dozens of publications in the field of public administration.Evaluating and incorporating the recent Woodward book (Rage).Cross-national Comparisons: Comparative cross-national studies show the heavy price of bad policies in the U.S, compared to the results achieved by others in three areas:Public Health: 200,000 avoidable deaths, six million avoidable infections and hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations.Economic: trillions of dollars of lost output and budget deficit, as well as millions of lost jobs.Political: a severely net negative perception of Trump’s handling of pandemic policy at home and abroad followed by a precipitous decline in his overall job approval and deterioration of his standing in the head-to-head match-up with Biden.Misrepresenting the Research on Good Policy to Defend the U.S. Failure: The single study (the Imperial College epidemiological report to the World Health Organization) on which the Trump administration relies for its claim of 2.2 million lives saved is misread and misrepresented. The analysis focuses how good things could have been under good policy.Under the “best” policy and the spread of the virus that results from it, the study projects the number of U.S. deaths between 6,600 and 24,000 over two years, not the 230,000 that will have perished in the U.S. in less than 10 months before election day.The projected results for good policy are close to the results achieved by other nations.These results are consistent with other epidemiological studies published shortly thereafter, which were dismissed by the Trump administration and its supporters as “political hit jobs.”The Flu: The effort to excuse the poor U.S. outcome by claiming COVID is like the flu fares no better under close scrutiny.In the U.S., COVID has already killed 4 times as many Americans as the most severe flu season in the past decade and 20 times as many as in the least severe flu season in that decade. COVID has killed over twice as many as the worst flu season in the last 50 years.Globally, COVID has killed only one-twentieth as many people who died in the worst flu season ever (1918-1919). In the U.S. it has already killed about one-third as many and that number of deaths continues to rise. The world appears to have learned something the Trump administration has not.The Complete Breakdown of Public Administration – Four dozen academic papers identify the principles for sound public administration during a crisis, demonstrating the cause and effect of the complete breakdown of public administration under Trump.Woodward’s book gives the “backstory” on the Trump administration’s response, recounting the president’s private thoughts and actions (or lack thereof),” Cooper said. “The data and policy analysis in the update give the publicly available “front-story.” They strongly agree.The Bottom Line for PolicyThe data and studies support the conclusions of others.Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, that ‘Trump is his own worst enemy.”Bob Woodward, “Trump is the wrong man for the Job.”The New England Journal of Medicine, in a rare election editorial. “When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent.’”The tragic irony of the research is that the Trump administration misinterpreted and the advice of its own experts that it disregarded, is that there never was a conflict between good policy (known as non-pharmaceutical interventions) and the development of a vaccine. We could have had both, but we got neither in an avoidable year of suffering.There never was a tradeoff between public health and economic performance. Controlling the virus first was the key to minimizing its economic impact. The only conflict was between the lifecycle of the virus as dramatically altered by good policy, and the political spin cycle of the of Trump administration that undermined an effective U.S. response.Learning the lessons about how not to react to a pandemic in the biosphere is urgent, because we face an ongoing pandemic in the atmosphere, climate change, in which the Trump made exactly the same policy mistakes two years earlier.”

The Political Economy of Pandemic Policy: 3rd Quarter

The Political Economy of Pandemic Policy: 3rd Quarter

The peculiarities of South African history: Thompsonian social history and the limits of colonialism

ABSTRACT From the late 1970s, South Africanist social history of broadly Thompsonian characteristics richly explicated the experiences of South Africa’s African population under ‘racial capitalism’. This article asks what value this scholarship might have in a moment when South African universities (like their British and American counterparts) face calls for the decolonization of curricula. Social historians delineated the peculiar nature of South Africa’s precocious but uneven capitalist transformation under colonial conditions, accounting for the preservation and resilience of communal rural areas falling under the control of chiefs and the dominance of oscillating migrant labour. Where structuralists saw a political economy tailor-made for mining capital, social historians identified important limits to the powers of capital and colonialism in the region – limits set, in large part, by the region’s African communities. Underlining the tragic irony of the powerful symbiosis between the patriarchal and ethnically defined livelihood strategies of (male) African migrant labourers and the interests of mining capital and segregationists, South Africanist social historians advanced a significantly less romantic vision of ‘the commons’ than that typically found in Thompson’s work or the work of his students.