Showing papers by "Linda Hutcheon published in 1992"

The Complex Functions of Irony

Abstract: La iron?a es uno de los tropos mds comentados desde Cicer?n hasta nuestros dias pero, a trav?s de los anos, en vez de afinarse, las definiciones han ido extendi?ndose. En el siglo veinte para algunos comentaristas la iron?a ha llegado a ser sin?nimo con el arte mismo. Este ensayo es un intento de estudiar las complejas funciones de la iron?a. Mi suposici?n b?sica es que el an?lisis de la funci?n del tropo ofrece el acercamiento mas util para la critica y la teoria literaria y nos permite ademds reconocer los cambios hist?ricos del concepto del t?rmino.

Double Talking: Essays on Verbal and Visual Ironies in Contemporary Canadian Art and Literature

Abstract: Abstract (summary): Are we living through an "irony epidemic"? In March in the mass media as well as in what we like to call "high art" and the academy, there has been a lot of talk about irony lately. Why? After all, irony is nothing new; it has been around for a long time,​ if Quintilian and Cicero are to be believed (see too Gaunt; Good; Green). Some people blame (and that is the appropriate verb, given the tone of most commentary) the rise of what has been labeled "postmodernism"; others simply point out that irony is a popular fin-de-siècle trope and that the twentieth century is merely poised to​ go out on the same note upon which it came in. But either view neglects the important changes in the iue of that trope over the last hundred years. One of the major changes has been the shift in the usage (and therefore meaning) of irony, from the idea of it as an absurdist, fundamentally pessimistic, and detached vision of existence​ (see Glicksberg) to the notion of irony as a more positive mode of artistic expression with renewed power as an engaged​ critical force, that is to say, as a rhetorical and structural strategy of​ resistance and opposition. In other words, irony today is neither​ trivial nor trivializing, despite some Marxist critics' contentions to​ the contrary (see Jameson; T. Eagleton, "Capitalism"). As Italo Calvino once reminded us: "there is such a thing as a lightness of​ thoughtfulness, just as we all know that there is a lightness of frivolity" (I o) and the two should not be confused.

Eco's Echoes: Ironizing the (Post) Modern@@@Foucault's Pendulum

Abstract: When one theorist publishes a book-a novel, at that-which contains in its title the name of another theorist, the academic reader is likely to be unable to resist looking for \"in-group\" ironies. When that novelist-theorist is Umberto Eco, who just happens to be someone who rarely mentions Michel Foucault by name, puzzlement may jostle for position with irony, even if we realize that Jean Bernard Leon Foucault was a nineteenth-century physicist whose famous pendulum hangs in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris. Nevertheless, I want to argue that it is almost impossible not to think of Michel Foucault when reading this novel. But as the puzzlement dissipates, the ironies remain. Eco has made it his specialty to write learned novels, bringing together his two worlds as creative writer and critical theorist, media darling and dissertation fodder. He has also made it difficult for reviewers and critics to engage with those novels, despite the tantalizing lures, because he selfreflexively ironizes the position not only of author but also of reader, thus reminding critical commentators of their secondary, even parasitic role. Given that, what do we do with a novel likeFoucault' sPendulum that ironizes all attempts at either deconstruction or construction of meaning? What happens when pages of contradictions get welded into a totalized vision of order, when life imitates art, when the narrative structure, while seemingly loose and baggy, is in fact obsessively ordered around the form of the occult Tree of the Sefirot? And what has any of this to do with Michel Foucault? Despite its overt trappings and publicity blurbs, Foucault' s Pendulum is not really an adventure story, a thriller, or a detective story, like The Name of the Rose, Eco's first novel. Foucault's Pendulum ends, rather than begins, with the requisite deaths. There is a plot-or rather, a plethora of plots-all brought together into something called the \"Plan.\" Instead of the causality we have been taught to expect in traditional plotting of popular genres, this Plan is governed by what Eco elsewhere calls \"a sort of spiral-like logic of mutually sympathetic elements. If the universe is a network of similitudes and cosmic sympathies, then there are no privileged causal chains\" [The Limits 19]. And this novelistic universe is just such a network, as we shall see. Michael Holquist has argued in \"Whodunit and Other Questions\" [135] that the detective story is to postmodernism what myth and depth psychology were to moderism. In Eco's perverse version of the postmodern, however, the detective as the metaphor of order and logic is ironized by the decisive

Eco's Echoes: Ironizing the (Post)Modern

Abstract: When one theorist publishes a book-a novel, at that-which contains in its title the name of another theorist, the academic reader is likely to be unable to resist looking for "in-group" ironies. When that novelist-theorist is Umberto Eco, who just happens to be someone who rarely mentions Michel Foucault by name, puzzlement may jostle for position with irony, even if we realize that Jean Bernard Leon Foucault was a nineteenth-century physicist whose famous pendulum hangs in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris. Nevertheless, I want to argue that it is almost impossible not to think of Michel Foucault when reading this novel. But as the puzzlement dissipates, the ironies remain. Eco has made it his specialty to write learned novels, bringing together his two worlds as creative writer and critical theorist, media darling and dissertation fodder. He has also made it difficult for reviewers and critics to engage with those novels, despite the tantalizing lures, because he selfreflexively ironizes the position not only of author but also of reader, thus reminding critical commentators of their secondary, even parasitic role. Given that, what do we do with a novel likeFoucault' sPendulum that ironizes all attempts at either deconstruction or construction of meaning? What happens when pages of contradictions get welded into a totalized vision of order, when life imitates art, when the narrative structure, while seemingly loose and baggy, is in fact obsessively ordered around the form of the occult Tree of the Sefirot? And what has any of this to do with Michel Foucault? Despite its overt trappings and publicity blurbs, Foucault' s Pendulum is not really an adventure story, a thriller, or a detective story, like The Name of the Rose, Eco's first novel. Foucault's Pendulum ends, rather than begins, with the requisite deaths. There is a plot-or rather, a plethora of plots-all brought together into something called the "Plan." Instead of the causality we have been taught to expect in traditional plotting of popular genres, this Plan is governed by what Eco elsewhere calls "a sort of spiral-like logic of mutually sympathetic elements. If the universe is a network of similitudes and cosmic sympathies, then there are no privileged causal chains" [The Limits 19]. And this novelistic universe is just such a network, as we shall see. Michael Holquist has argued in "Whodunit and Other Questions" [135] that the detective story is to postmodernism what myth and depth psychology were to moderism. In Eco's perverse version of the postmodern, however, the detective as the metaphor of order and logic is ironized by the decisive

Both/And: The Alternative of Relational Thinking

Abstract: To call the issues facing departments of English today difficult or sensitive would obviously be understating the case. Chairs would be forgiven if they had nightmares about the incommensurability of the demands made on them and the kind of institutional and collegial support they can count on. Some of the problems they face are internal ones, such as how to deal with the ideological factions—often generational—within departments. Others are more public: how to justify our discipline to a population indoctrinated with the notion that what we do has been irremediably politicized, rendered incapable of disinterested intellectual investigation.

Introduction: Situating Knowledge

Abstract: When Jean-Francois Lyotard entitled his 'report on knowledge' for the Quebec government in the 1970s the 'postmodern condition,' he gave a (much contested) label to something important that was happening in our familiar European-based culture's concept of what constitutes knowledge. Whether our own view of this and the rhetoric in which we might choose to talk about it suggest crisis or opportunity may be a question of temperament, but most of us have to face daily the consequences of the Age of Information Technology. For educators, this means that we can no longer assume that training within a discipline is simply a matter of the acquisition of something unproblematically called 'knowledge.' In a time of information overload, as Lyotard pointed out, the question of 'who will know? cannot be separated from the brute fact that it is efficiency of information transmission that will likely legislate available knowledge. Some commentators have seen universities as failing in their traditional role here and p...