The Middle Ages

This course will offer an overview of the fundamentals of irony and its theoretization from Socrates to the present day. We will examine the history of irony in all its permutations, as well as the various positions irony occupies within rhetoric, ontology, aesthetics, politics, and literary theory. Above all, we will ask the question of why the seemingly simple matter of irony proves to be such a tenacious problem in Western thought, and why it continues to be a topic of debate and controversy (including repeated calls for and announcements of its “end”) up to today. Readings will include works by Plato, Schlegel, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Benjamin, de Man, Deleuze, Derrida, Rorty, and Butler, as well as literary texts by Flaubert, Walser, Mann, and others.