Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'The romantic irony'

This essay investigates the prospect of Romantic Irony’s potential resurgence in contemporary poetics and discusses its relevance and likeness with metamodernism. The internet has by now not only seeped into, but fully permeated, the process of literary production and distribution. The effect of this has been the birth of a new kind of poetic discourse which can broadly be called metamodernism, The New Sincerity or Alt-lit. This movement is characterized by its self-reflexive metacommentary, fragmentary nature and an oscillation between of irony and sincerity. Vermeulen and Akker, among others, have hinted at metamodernism’s relation to Romanticism, but research into the specifics of its tendency towards Romantic Irony is scarce. By viewing the writings of Steve Roggenbuck (a central figure in the new poetic movement), alongside the philosophy of Friedrich Schlegel, I propose a comparative framework for discussion of sincerity, irony and the instrumentalization of contemporary metamodernist writing. I demonstrate that Roggenbuck’s writing displays narratological, tropological and thematic tendencies commonly associated with both Romantic Irony and metamodernism. Apart from broader structural comparison, I attempt a comparative analysis between Roggenbuck’s poetry (2010-2015) and Thomas Carlyle’s novel “Sartor Resartus” (1833-1834) in order to provide a visualisation of the rhetorical and narratological strategies of Romantic Irony. I aim to frame Romantic Irony as a sensibility, or mode of discourse - rather than a strict system of thought - which may still be at work today. In extension, the sensibilities of Romantic Irony may shed further light into the philosophical potential of the seemingly incomprehensible and contradictory tendencies of metamodernism. By ironicizing its poetic form, literary ambition and desire for sincerity in a post-postmodern era, Roggenbuck’s poetry celebrates ambiguity and literary failure, ultimately framing irony as a constructive and potentially democratic operation.

This thesis examines the dramatic implications of the grotesque in Romantic aesthetics, particularly in relation to its poetics of plurality. There have been few studies exploring the drama of the Romantic grotesque, a category that accentuates the multiplicity of the self, while permitting diverse ways of seeing. The post-Kantian philosophy backing Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic irony provides the most decisive rationalisation of this plurality of identity and aesthetic expression through theatrical play, and forms the theoretical framework for my study. Poetry and philosophy are merged in Schlegel’s attempt to create Romantic modernity out of this self-conscious blurring of inherited perspectives and genres—a mixing and transgressing of past demarcations that simultaneously create the condition of the Romantic grotesque. The other writers examined in this thesis include A. W. Schlegel, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, and Charles Baudelaire. The primary research question that this thesis investigates is: how is the grotesque used to re-evaluate notions of aesthetic beauty? And my answer emerges from a study of those thinkers in Schlegel’s tradition who evolve a modern, ironic regard for conventional literary proprieties. Furthermore, how does the grotesque rewrite ideas of poetic subjectivity and expression? Here, my answer foregrounds the enormous importance of Shakespeare as the literary example supporting the new theories. Shakespearean drama legitimises the grotesque as ontology and literary mode. Consequently, in reviewing unique, critically hybrid texts like the Schlegelian fragments, Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare (Racine and Shakespeare), Hugo’s Préface de Cromwell (Preface to Cromwell), and Baudelaire’s De L’Essence du Rire (On the Essence of Laughter), this thesis will use theories of continental Romanticism to reposition the significance of an English aesthetic. Through this, I claim that the Romantic revisioning of the Shakespearean grotesque helps create the ideas of post-Revolutionary modernity that are crucial to the larger projects of European Romanticism, and the ideas of modernity emerging from them.

The thesis offers an interpretation of Shelley's poetry which focuses on his treatment of external nature. Its main argument is that a subject-object dialectic lies at the basis of his thought and style. Manifesting itself as a tension and oscillation between dualist and monist tendencies, this dialectic underlies the opposing strains of thought associated with his sceptical idealism; it informs the relationship between various contraries with which he is recurrently concerned, such as reason and feeling, necessity and freedom, language and thought; and it accounts for some major characteristics of his style--for example, its self-reflexiveness, indeterminacy, and restless forward momentum. Nature is found to play a complex dual function in this dialectical process: first, as the circumference to the circle of which mind is the centre, it provides the material of thought and poetry; secondly, through its cyclic processes, it serves as an emblem of the mind's dynamic relationship with that material. In finding the characteristic thought-pattern of his poetry to be constituted of a creative-destructive interplay of contraries, the thesis contends that Shelley is a significant exponent of Romantic irony. Such a reading of his work mediates between an earlier tradition of interpreting him as a Platonising poet of nature and the more recent emphasis that has been given to his philosophical scepticism and political radicalism. Throughout, attention is given to the interacting influences of his direct experience of nature (as recorded mainly in his letters) and the representations of nature he encounters in his reading. The following poems, chosen for their importance in Shelley's canon and as clear illustrations of his treatment of nature, are discussed chronologically in successive chapters: Queen Mab, Master, the 1816 odes, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, and The Triumph of Life.

In Chapter One, I discuss definitions of romantic irony, and the various ways in which romantic irony might be viewed in conjunction with the work of these three authors. In order to approach a working definition of 'the romantic', I briefly frame the relationships between romance, romanticism and romantic irony, and establish a particular set of ideas and themes which I view as central to this concept. In this chapter I also develop a theoretical framework for the rest of the thesis, examining points of convergence and divergence between 'the romantic', feminism, post-colonialism, and postmodernism. In Chapter Two, I examine how Carter ironises the dynamic of the Romantic sublime in her work, and how her work develops from an exploration of abjection in her first novel, to an exploration of the sublime in proceeding novels. I view her work in conjunction with Bakhtin's ideas of the grotesque and Kristeva's ideas of the abject. This chapter also explores the role Romantic love plays in shaping the subjectivity of Carter's fictional characters, and connects this with the sublime, transgressive nature of love as Carter describes it in her fiction and journalism. In Chapter Three, I examine how Rushdie ironises and refigures various ideas within romance and romanticism, such as Romantic imagination, Romantic love, the Romantic artist as a hero and/or prophet, and the Romantic sublime (with regard to the dynamic between artist and (M)other). I discuss how these revisionings of Romantic ideas relate to issues of post-colonial identity such as the fate of nationalism and the construction of hybrid/migrant identities. I also question if Rushdie's reinvention of Romantic ideas doesn't to a certain extent reproduce the difficulties with representations of gender found within, especially, the dynamic of the Romantic sublime.

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This dissertation aims to investigate the value of irony as a stylistic and critical resource in the representation of Machado's vision on the problem of slavery in Brazilian society. For didactic purposes, the following short stories will be studied: Virginius (1864), Mariana (1871), Encher tempo (1876), O caso da vara (1891) and Pai contra mãe (1906). This approach constitutes an attempt to elucidate the "possible" lack of criticism in Machado's work regarding to slavery, as critics have stated for a long time. Therefore, dealing with black slavery in Brazil means to understand it not as a motivating gear of a mere economic-social system that lasted for three centuries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century but, above all, as a subject represented at the margin, ruthlessly exploited and excluded within a society undergoing modernization. Thus, in this context, the trajectory of the black in Machado‟s short stories should be seen, by the literary perspective, as a very significant aspect in addition to the historical and cultural contexts.
Resumo: Esta dissertação tem, como objetivo, investigar o valor da ironia romântica como recurso estilístico e crítico na representação da visão machadiana sobre o problema da escravidão na sociedade brasileira. Para efeito didático, serão estudados os seguintes contos: Virginius (1864), Mariana (1871), Encher tempo (1876), O caso da vara (1891) e Pai contra mãe (1906). A referida abordagem constitui-se como uma tentativa em elucidar a possível falta de criticidade da obra machadiana, no tocante ao problema da escravidão, conforme foi afirmado, durante muito tempo, pela Crítica Literária. Portanto, tratar a respeito do negro na escravidão brasileira compreende entendê-lo não como uma engrenagem motivadora de um mero sistema econômico-social que perdurou por três séculos do XVI ao XIX mas, antes de tudo, como um sujeito representado à margem, explorado desumanamente e excluído em uma sociedade em vias de modernização. Assim, a trajetória do negro, nos contos machadianos, nesse contexto, deve ser vista a partir da perspectiva literária, como um aspecto bastante significativo, além dos contextos histórico e cultural.

This dissertation explores the intimate relationship between irony and romantic subjectivity, by drawing on feminist psychoanalytical theory, via an examination of the shiftings of irony, and humor, in the works of the Swedish romanticist P. D. A. Atterbom (1790–1855). It looks at the critical role played by irony in the formation of Romantic subjectivity, and explores irony’s potential to undermine dualistically gendered notions of subject-object relations. For Atterbom, irony is an aesthetic concept closely related to drama, informed not only by German Romantic-ironic theorists such as Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul, but also by the works of Shakespeare, Ludwig Tieck, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. The thesis follows the shiftings of Romantic irony in Atterbom’s major literary texts: the cycle of poems Blommorna [The Flowers] (1811), where the Ovidian transformations are used metafictively to play with the relation between poet, poem, and reader; and the literary satire Rimmarbandet [The Rhyme Band] (1810), which, inspired by Tieck’s Der Gestiefelte Kater (1797), uses the metafictive theatre-in-the-theatre motif, as well as carnivalesque and grotesque motifs to expose contrived theatricality and homosocial misogyny in the prevailing culture. The dynamic between the satirist’s subject and the attacked object is a polarized power struggle, where revolt is followed by submission. In this respect, Romantic satire is here conservative. In the fairy tale play Lycksalighetens ö [Island of Felicity] (1824–27), tragedy’s irony is a dialectic between the ideal and the real that strives to create both inner and outer renewal. The play reaches out metafictively to the reader and turns her/him into the poet of a new version of the fairy tale. The reading/writing process inscribed in the work thus becomes a form of renewal and liberation from grief, and old, patriarchal gender roles. Finally, the humorous, unfinished idyll Fågel Blå [Blue Bird] (1814, 1818, 1858) is a work in many pieces, a fragment, a sketch and a non finito that together stages a restorative creative process, where the reader is asked to take part in joining together the scattered parts of Blue Bird itself. To conclude, irony is a feature of Romanticism, which makes the Romantic, literary subject relational and dialogical, open to its Other, and herein lies a form of ethics and an escape from a conventional, patriarchal notion of the self. I discuss this with Julia Kristeva’s theories on how subjectivity changes when it becomes poetic and Jessica Benjamin’s Winnicott-influenced theory of how play can offer a way out from patriarchy’s strict gender roles. The shiftings of irony in Atterbom’s work show a development from the satirical subject, where an aggressive form of self-assertion conceals a lack of individuality – via tragedy’s painstaking efforts to integrate repressed aspects of the self – to the idyll’s more harmonious subject, who has the capacity to laugh at him/herself and see both the grotesque in the holy, and the holy in the grotesque.

Cette thèse se propose d'étudier les différentes manifestations de l'ironie dans la poétique romanesque de L'Homme qui rit de Victor Hugo selon trois axes d'étude. Le premier s'organise autour d'une analyse de l'énonciation polyphonique dans le roman. Qui prend en charge le récit et avec quelles intentions? Les propos des personnages sont souvent empreints d'ironie, et sont commentés par le narrateur ou l'auteur. Nous observons surtout la fonction de ses paroles dans l’énoncé : comment leur insertion influence-elle le déroulement du récit? Pourquoi favorisent-elles les manifestations de l’ironie? Puis, le deuxième axe de notre réflexion s'interroge sur le mélange des genres qui favorise également l’émergence de la parole ironique. L'utilisation de l’ironie permet à Victor Hugo de porter un regard critique sur son travail d'écrivain en reconsidérant ses pratiques d’écriture. Dans son roman L'Homme qui rit,il se veut, d’abord, poète en proposant une écriture proche de celle du texte poétique où l’image figure les idées et favorise aussi le registre ironique. L’auteur endosse aussi le rôle de dramaturge en mettant en scène la parole pour la rendre plus ironique et, en même temps, le travail de sape permanent de l’ironie ne fait qu’amplifier les visées politiques et littéraires de l’auteur. Victor Hugo dénonce certaines pratiques politiques afin de remettre en question aussi sa propre expérience d’homme politique. Enfin, le dernier axe de cette étude se propose d'observer la dimension métaphysique de l’ironie au cœur de la poétique en soulignant les différentes influences des mouvements de pensées philosophiques. Dans L’Homme qui rit, on peut distinguer deux choses : l’ironie classique, définie et utilisée au cours de l’Antiquité, et l’ironie moderne, apparaissant à la fin du 18ème siècle, qui correspond à l’émergence de l’ironie romantique. Dans le roman, l’ironie verbale s’inspire des procédés rhétoriques employés par les philosophes de l’Antiquité mais aussi de l’antiphrase, arme favorite des philosophes des Lumières pour qui la littérature ne se présente plus seulement comme un témoignage ou la critique d’une époque, mais elle devient aussi un intermédiaire entre l’écrivain et son lectorat afin que ce dernier s’interroge davantage sur sa condition et sur tout ce qui l’entoure. Dans L'Homme qui rit, l’utilisation de l’ironie n'a pas seulement pour vocation de railler, elle permet au lecteur d’étendre et d’approfondir sa réflexion sur sa propre condition
This thesis suggests studying the various appearances of irony in the romantic poetics of The Man who laughs by Victor Hugo according to three axes of study. The first one gets organized around an analysis of the polyphonic statement in the novel. Who takes care of the narrative and what are the intentions? The comments of the characters are often tinged with irony, and are commented upon by the narrator or the author. We observe especially the function of his words in the statement: how does their insertion influence the unfolding of the narrative? Why do they favor the demonstrations of irony? Then, the second axis of our reflection leads us to wonder about the mixture of the genres which also favors the emergence of the ironic word. The use of irony allows Victor Hugo to take a critical look at his work of writer by reconsidering his practices of writing. In his novel The Man who laughs, he is meant to be, at first, a poet by proposing a writing close to that of the poetic text where the image represents the ideas and also favors the ironic register. The author also assumes the role of playwright by staging the word to make it more ironic and, at the same time, the permanent undermining of irony is only amplifying the political and literary aims of the author. Victor Hugo denounces some political practices to question also his own experience as a politician

Au cours des années 1820-1830, l’ironie romantique a contribué à élargir le champ de la prose et de la langue littéraires, en se modelant sur une situation de communication orale puis en adoptant le ton de la lettre intime. Les figures de l’ironie romantique telles que la métalepse, l’auteur-narrateur tout-puissant ont servi à la fois de laboratoire pour la formation d’une langue littéraire et de schémas narratifs adaptés aux exigences de l’époque, de tribune aux réflexions sur le destin et le contenu de la prose littéraire russe, et d’« incubateur » pour le nouveau lecteur, en créant des lecteurs-interlocuteurs fictifs. Le corpus comprend : Gajdamak (1826-1827) d’O.M. Somov ; Rukopis’ […] Xabarova (1828) de P.L. Jakovlev ; Ispytanije (1830), Večer na kavkazskix vodax v 1824 godu (1830) et Strašnoe gadanie (1831) d’A.A. Bestužev-Marlinskij ; Strannik (1831-1832) d‘A.F. Vel’tman ; Pestrye skazki (1833) de V.F. Odoevskij ; Fantastičeskie putešestvija barona Brambeusa (1833), Bol’šoj vyxod u Satany (1834) et Teorija obrazovannoj besedy (1835) d’O.I. Senkovskij. La haute conscience intertextuelle des œuvres, leur poétique du jeu métaleptique, leur ambition encyclopédique et métalittéraire ont exprimé les processus qui transformaient la littérature russe de l’intérieur (références à Karamzin, Žukovskij, Puškin, Gogol’) et de l’extérieur (la littérature européenne). L’ironie romantique a donc permis l’évolution consciente et accélérée de la littérature russe vers le roman en prose et le réalisme du second XIXe siècle. Elle apparaît comme un phénomène de mode, mais aussi comme une source d’inspiration pour les théories formaliste et bakhtinienne, et pour le postmodernisme russe
Between 1820 and 1840, Romantic irony has contributed to widen the spectrum of Russian literary prose and language, fashioning itself after a situation of oral communication, then adopting the tone and structure of the intimate letter. Figures of Romantic irony such as the reader-conversationalist, the author as sole master, the metalepsis, served not only as a laboratory for the formation of a literary language and narrative plots adapted to contemporary demands, but also as a tribune for debates on the fate and content of Russian literary prose, and as an incubator for the new reader. Works such as Gajdamak (1826-1827) by O.M. Somov, Rukopis’ […] Xabarova (1828) by P.L. Jakovlev, Ispytanije (1830), Večer na kavkazskix vodax v 1824 godu (1830) and Strašnoje gadanije (1831) by A.A. Bestužev-Marlinskij , Strannik (1831-1832) by A.F. Vel’tman, Pestryje skazki (1833) by V.F. Odojevskij, Fantastičeskije putešestvija barona Brambeusa (1833), Bol’šoj vyxod u Satany (1834) and Teorija obrazovannoj besedy (1835) by O.I. Senkovskij, show a vivid self-consciousness, a widely shared concern for intertextuality and common poetics involving metaleptic games, encyclopaedic ambition. These reveal the transformation of Russian literary prose, working simultaneously from within (Karamzin, Žukovskij, Puškin, Gogol’) and from outside. Romantic irony in Russian literary prose therefore allowed a conscious and rapid evolution of Russian literature toward the novel in prose and the realism of the second XIXth century. Thus, Romantic irony appears not only as a fashion, but also as a distant source of inspiration for Formalist and Bakhtinian theories, and for postmodernist literature

Dans les sciences humaines, le travail du négatif est une notion qui appartient surtout aux domaines philosophiques et psychanalytiques. En tenant compte de cette filiation, sa pertinence dans le champ littéraire se révèle également effective. En effet, lorsque l’on confronte l’idée à l’œuvre romanesque de Réjean Ducharme, l’action du travail du négatif rend compte des enjeux souterrains de cette écriture. Ainsi, le texte apparaît comme le lieu de l’instabilité où chacune des composantes donne à voir son envers et où les contradictions coexistent. Dans cette dynamique, les trois catégories du récit vacillent : elles sont sculptées dans une autre matière que celle qu’on leur assigne généralement. Dans un même élan, le style ducharmien s’empare du travail du négatif en défigeant le mot, en resémantisant la phrase, en offrant à la parole le pouvoir d’avoir un impact sur le réel. Tout est conçu pour échapper à la fixité. Construits de la sorte, les romans véhiculent une vision du monde tragique. Cette dernière, à travers l’acte de lecture, se voit pétrie par le grotesque et engendre alors un fatum qui s’apparente à l’uniformisation. Cette réalité dévoile, paradoxalement, un univers en déséquilibre qui fait écho à l’étymologie du mot baroque, « perle irrégulière ». Le texte ducharmien est donc le carrefour de plusieurs esthétiques qui possèdent toutes, en leur essence, un mouvement semblable au travail du négatif. Celui-ci peut être perçu, dans tous les cas, comme un révélateur de littérarité. Il opère, d’ailleurs, de cette manière, dans d’autres œuvres francophones, notamment dans celles de Rachid Boudjedra, de Maurice Bandaman et de Dominique Rolin
In Human Sciences, the work of the negative is a concept which mainly belongs to the philosophical and psychoanalytical fields. Taking into account this relationship, its relevance in the literary field also proves effective. Indeed, when this notion is applied to the novels of Réjean Ducharme, the action of the work of the negative reveals the underground stakes of the author’s work. Thus, his writing takes us constantly back and forth between all the opposed elements which populate it. Ducharme’s texts are a place of instability, where each component shows its hidden side and where contradictions shaped by the process of involution coexist. Within this dynamic, the narrative mode loses its equilibrium: time, space and characters are sculpted with very unusual clay. In the same spirit, Ducharme’s writing style seizes the work of the negative by loosening words, and giving a new meaning to sentences, by offering to the word the power of having an impact on reality. Everything is designed to escape immobility. Novels built on this pattern convey a tragic vision of the world; a vision which through the act of reading finds itself steeped in the grotesque and therefore generates a fatum, which is very similar to sameness. Paradoxically, this reality unveils an unbalanced world and echoes the baroque word "irregular pearl" in its etymological meaning. Ducharme’s writing is at a crossroad between several aesthetics, whose quintessential principles are similar to the work of the negative. The latter can be perceived as an indicator of literariness and can be found in some of other French works, including those of Rachid Boudjedra, Maurice Bandaman and Dominique Rolin

En sudie i gonzojournalistiken, dess innebörd och vad den förmedlar. Studien beskriver och kopplar gonzojournalistiken till romantikens teori och kunskapssyn och är uppdelad i två huvuddelar vilka beskriver perspektivismen samt den romantika ironi som rymms inom gonzojournalistikens teknik.

A Web Of Eyes: Irony and romanticism in the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar (Mgr. Vít Kazmar) Abstract The present doctoral thesis offers an interpretation of the works of Borges and Cortázar through the lens of romantic irony. It outlines the origin of the notion of irony from greek drama through philosophical dialogue to rhetorics. The main focus of the work is Schlegel's concept of romantic irony. Various aspects serve as a basis for the interpretation of the work of both Argentine writers in particular chapters: the struggle between enthusiasmus and scepsis in Borges (litotes) and Cortázar (novelistic dialogue), motive of the double, reflexivity in literature written in the spanish language from Cervantes to Borges, focusing on Borges' sources of inspiration (Carlyle, Fernández, Unamuno); Cortázars reflexive short stories, heteronyms of both authors (Morelli, Ménard); and finally the tendency to see the world from above, to constant transcendence of perspective in Borges' short stories and poems and in Cortázar's novel 62: A model kit, as well as in his poetics based on the works of John Keats.

The thesis is dedicated to the question of relation of Schlegel's conception of the "progressive universal poetry" to the principle of the aesthetic autonomy as the central feature of the modern notion of art. Against the opinion of J. M. Bernstein the point of view is defended, according to which Schlegel's theory doesn't undermine but advances the aesthetic autonomy. The interpretation of romantic philosophy in work of Manfred Frank serves as a base for the argument. The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first two of them offer the basic outline of the problem of the aesthetic autonomy as the context in which Schlegel's romantic aesthetic is to be examined. The third and the forth chapters introduce the main elements of this theory. The fifth chapter summarizes Frank's interpretation of the philosophy of Friedrich Schlegel. The sixth chapter contains the resume and subsequent challenging of the argument of J. M. Bernstein, who argues that the conception of the "progressive universal poetry" leads to the "philosophical disenfranchisement of art". On the background of its criticism the alternative position is offered, which holds, that Schlegel advances the doctrine of the aesthetic autonomy by replacing the view of an artwork as an actual binding of nature and freedom with the notion of the...

Through the creation of a graphic novel based on a Romanian Holocaust survivor’s testimony, this study attempts to clarify the role of artistic creation in meaning-making during Holocaust and genocide education. In facilitating empathy and moral education, the creative process encourages a deeper exploration of these troubling topics than is possible within the confines of a traditional academic approach. In order to understand this process, I worked with the testimony of Zoly Zamir, who escaped Bucharest following the Iron Guard Rebellion of 1941. The creation of the graphic novel took me from Austin to Houston and Romania, where I sought to trace the echoes of history in architecture and environment. Translating Zamir’s story into word and image produced an empathetic bond to the narrative and the region, facilitating a deeper understanding of the hows and whys of the Holocaust. That engagement spurred a desire to continue to ask questions, to look beyond a regimented understanding and view the broader implications of the history.
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