that liberation from irony is only possible through (what Kierkegaard calls) a “leap,” by “ethically” choosing one’s freedom, by choosing the responsibility to give shape and meaning to that freedom.
ellauri077.html on line 488: This also means that no positive content lies “behind” it, because existential irony places the totality of existence under negation, and, therefore, no possible meaning remains for it.
ellauri077.html on line 544: With irony as our environment, we have been raised and conditioned to “distrust strong belief, open conviction,” writes Wallace.
ellauri077.html on line 555: In his interview with Larry McCaffery, Wallace shows he was aware of his failure to overcome the use of postmodern irony: “I got trapped just trying to expose the illusions of metafiction the same way metafiction had tried to expose the illusions of the pseudo-unmediated realist fiction that had come before it. It was a horror show.”
ellauri077.html on line 608: The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment
ellauri090.html on line 105: Following The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881) and preceding Dom Casmurro (1899), this book is considered by modern critics to be the second of Machado de Assis's realist trilogy, in which the author was concerned with using pessimism and irony to criticize the customs and philosophy of his time, in the process parodying scientism, Social darwinism, and Comte's positivism, although he did not remove all Romantic elements from the plot.
ellauri095.html on line 578: The loss of any emigrant ship had a strong international dimension and was accordingly extensively reported in English in both the ´Times´ of London and the ´New York Times´, for there was a sad irony in the deaths of passengers who had taken ship in search of a better life. Five Franciscan nuns from Salzkotten (now in Nordrhein-Westfalen, western Germany), named Barbara Hultenschmidt, Henrika Fassbender, Norbeta Reinkobe, Aurea Badziura and Brigitta Damhorst, died in the wreck. They were fleeing religious oppression at home as a result of anti-Catholic laws enacted as part of Otto von Bismarck´s ´Kulturkampf´ ("culture struggle") aimed at building centralised and unified German state resisting outside influences. One reader moved by the story in the London press was the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote a moving and highly romanticised poem based on the incident, ´The Wreck of the Deutschland´. As Hopkins put it: ´Rhine refused them: Thames would ruin them´.
ellauri109.html on line 332: In the spring of 1799, the 21-year-old Kleist wrote a letter to his half-sister Ulrike [de] in which he found it "incomprehensible how a human being can live without a life plan" (Lebensplan). In effect, Kleist sought and discovered an overwhelming sense of security by looking to the future with a definitive plan for his life. It brought him happiness and assured him of confidence, especially knowing life without a plan only saw despair and discomfort. The irony of his suicide is the fodder of his critics.
ellauri156.html on line 471: Uriah has to understand what the king is suggesting. Who wouldn't want to go home and enjoy his wife after some time of separation, thanks to the war with the Ammonites? Instead, we are told that Uriah never leaves the king's house. He sleeps in the doorway of the king's house, in the presence of a number of the king's servants. I am inclined to understand that at least some of these servants, if not all of them, are the king's bodyguards (compare 1 Kings 14:27-28). Uriah is a soldier. He has been called to his king's presence, away from the battle. But as a faithful servant of the king, he will not enjoy a night alone with his wife; instead, he will join with those who guard the king's life. This is the way he can serve his king in Jerusalem, and so this is what he chooses to do rather than to go home. The irony is overwhelming. The king's faithful soldier spends the night guarding the 50% new life of the king in his wife's womb, the king who has taken his own wife in the night, and who will soon take his life as well. Dramatic irony.
ellauri171.html on line 1050: Although the readers know that God has killed two of Judah’s sons, Judah does not. This is known as dramatic irony. He suspects that Tamar is a “lethal woman,” a woman whose sexual partners are all doomed to die. So, Judah is afraid to give Tamar to his youngest son, Shelah, the inventor of Shelah quantifiers. So doing, Judah wrongs Tamar. According to Near Eastern custom, known from Middle Assyrian laws, if a man has no son over ten years old, he could perform the Levirate marriage (yibbum) obligation himself; if he does not, the woman is declared a “widow,” free to marry again. Judah, who is perhaps afraid of Tamar’s lethal character, could have set her free. But he does not—he sends her to live as “a widow” in her father’s house. Unlike other widows, she cannot remarry and must stay chaste on pain of death. She is in limbo.
ellauri185.html on line 863: The irony in Bellow’s soul was that he craved love and experience, and learned to view people coldly and clinically. The writer Amos Oz recalled most vividly from his friendship with Bellow an exchange that they shared privately about death. “I said I was hoping to die in my sleep, but Saul responded by saying that, on the contrary, he would like to die wide awake and fully conscious, because his death is such a crucial experience he wouldn’t want to miss it.”
ellauri189.html on line 214: The boundless steppe of the Ukraine turns out to be a cage with invisible bars. Man appears at first sight to be free, without apparent goal roaming over the plain of life, being a lord of the steppe, “a king of the wilderness” (“król pustyni”), or tries to create in a premeditated manner his own future, deciding – by the way – on the fate of his fellow men (the source of unceasing conflicts). However, in the latter case he often unwittingly obeys the voice of his own wild, unruly nature. The ambivalence of this situation seems to be intimately connected with the concept of romantic irony. Man possesses the ability to objectify his passions, i.e. he can explain them psychologically, by means of a chain of causes and effects, but he still remains the slave of this volitional nature that constitutes his innermost self, always and ever receding (like the horizon of the Ukrainian plain) when he tries to catch it (the idea of the Unconscious does not really explain this “schizophrenic” state of mind – it merely affirms man’s essential homelessness: I am myself, when I realize that my self eternally escapes me). - I can relate to that, says the Russian tank driver sitting stuck in the Ukrainian mud.
ellauri191.html on line 1714: "who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality"
ellauri192.html on line 75: The poetic output is perhaps comparable to that of the contemporary Dadaism but the linguistic theory or metaphysics behind zaum was entirely devoid of the gentle reflexive irony of that movement and in all seriousness intended to recover the sound symbolism of a lost aboriginal tongue. Russians have absolutely no sense of humor. Exhibiting traits of a Slavic national mysticism, Kruchenykh aimed at recovering the primeval Slavic mother-tongue in particular.
ellauri197.html on line 313: A piece of irony is that she claims the memory is “making November difficult,” but as “November” is the final month of autumn and a step toward harsh winter, it could be noted as one of the harsher months of the year on its own. With this in mind, her phrasing could be a subtle hint that her current state is already harsh, and perhaps she is blaming too much on the memory in regard to her unhappiness.
ellauri219.html on line 1024: The American sublime, as Harold Bloom has said, “is always also an American irony”. Jayne Mansfield's bumper bullets. People hugging their pit bulls sexually and getting 15 years for it. Do you know what Teilhard de Chardin called the “noosphere”? Not the foggiest. I think what Rachel has in mind here is the Internet. Who is or was Teilhard anyway? Teilhard was mentioned by Pynchon, see album 69. Not a very memorable character apparently. Tässä Pierren tärkeimpiä läppiä, aika heruttavia:
ellauri222.html on line 76: The irony in Bellow’s soul was that he craved love and experience, and learned to view people coldly and clinically. The writer Amos Oz recalled most vividly from his friendship with Bellow an exchange that they shared privately about death. “I said I was hoping to die in my sleep, but Saul responded by saying that, on the contrary, he would like to die wide awake and fully conscious, because his death is such a crucial experience he wouldn’t want to miss it.”
ellauri270.html on line 302: The irony in “The Daemon Lover” is that the female protagonist becomes suspect as she hunts for the mysterious young man “who promised to marry her” (DL 23). Everywhere she searches, she encounters couples who mock her with not-so-subtle insinuations that she is crazy. Indeed, at the end of the story she may well have become insane; the narrative is ambiguous on this point. Significantly, however, if the nameless woman has indeed lost her mind, it is James who is responsible. Although some critics speculate that the disruptive male figure—both in this story and in the others in the collection—is a hallucination of a sexually repressed character, the epilogue to The Lottery, a ballad entitled “James Harris, The Daemon Lover,” suggests otherwise: He is, in fact, the devil himself.
ellauri324.html on line 275: The infrastructure is just one symptom of America’s degradation: the streets of major cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles are filling up with homeless drug addicts, leaving the sidewalks littered with tents, needles, and human waste. Next to nothing is done for these people because it is seen as “their problem” that they are mentally ill, and lack access to mental health services and affordable housing. The irony is that there are so many of these people now that they have become everyone’s problem. Retailers in downtown SF are closing down their stores because the conditions in the streets are keeping paying customers away, whilst the cops barely regard shoplifting as a crime.
ellauri331.html on line 497: RIA Novosti suljettiin vuonna 2014; maaliskuusta 2014 alkaen henkilöstölle kerrottiin, että heillä oli mahdollisuus siirtää työsopimuksensa Rossiya Segodnyalle tai tehdä irtisanomissopimus. Rossija Segodnya lanseerasi 10. marraskuuta 2014 Sputnik- multimediaalustan, joka korvaa kansainvälisesti RIA Novostin ja Voice of Russian. Itse Venäjällä Rossija Segodnya kuitenkin jatkaa venäjänkielisen uutispalvelun operoimista RIA Novosti-nimellä ria.ru- verkkosivustollaan. RIA Novostin viimeinen päätoimittaja oli Svetlana Mironyuk, ensimmäinen nainen, joka nimitettiin tehtävään viraston historiassa, ja kazo kuinka kävi.
ellauri331.html on line 578: RT:n perustamisen aikaan RIA Novostin johtaja Svetlana Mironyuk totesi: "Valitettavasti lännen massatietoisuuden tasolla Venäjä yhdistetään kolmeen sanaan: kommunismi, lumi ja köyhyys", ja lisäsi "haluaisimme antaae täydellisemmän kuvan elämästä maassamme. Äskeisestä luettelosta jäi pois korruptio ja alkoholiongelma. Nyttemmin mukaan kuuluu myös kapitalismi, rahanhimo, köyhien kyykytys ja oligarkia. Ne kaikki olemme omaxuneet tosi nopeasti lännestä."
ellauri368.html on line 296: Evidently, his satire lacks that subtle irony which made Profiat Duraii's Epistle so powerful, and at the same time gained for it such great popularity. Undoubtedly, it is due to this directness and plainness of speech, that this parody has never yet seen the light of day. About as humorous as this invective against J.N. somewhat earlier:
ellauri389.html on line 93: When "Old China" appeared in 1823, British porcelain had finally gained supremacy over Chinese porcelain. This revolution in the Sino-British trade imbalance was marked when the British porcelain manufacturer Spode began to furnish the Canton branch of the East India Company with English-manufactured "old blue," to compete in local Chinese markets against domestically manufactured porcelain. The event inverted the previously economically crippling import of porcelain to Britain: by 1826 the flow of silver between the countries ran in Britain's favor. The first translation into Chinese of k the Chinese characters that certified real, Chinese-made porcelain. Haha the irony of it all.
xxx/ellauri027.html on line 307: If you want to be a self-development seminar and motivate people, then be a self-development seminar and motivate people. If you want to be a formal institute and have serious effects on policy and academia, then do that. Don’t half-ass both and muddy them with gratuitous talks and performances. The irony in all of this was that Wilber’s integral framework applied to organizations and business and should have accounted for these branding issues, but didn’t. The ironies would soon continue to mount.
xxx/ellauri085.html on line 106: If it is a surprise to learn that Lawrence originally conceived of Women in Love as a money-making pot-boiler, it comes as an endearing shock to read that James Joyce submitted some of his early work to the firm of Mills and Boon. There is no record of the reader’s report, beyond the fact that he rejected Dubliners as unsuitable material for the unique imprint of that publishing house. For his part, Lawrence had no doubt that the author of Ulysses was the real smutmonger of modern fiction. ‘My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is!’, he wrote to Aldous Huxley, ‘nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate journalistic dirty-mindedness.’ To his wife Frieda he wrote, after reading Ulysses, that ‘the last part of it is the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written’; and he later complained that Joyce had degraded the novel to the level of an instrument for measuring twinges in the toes of unremarkable men. Joyce’s reply to the charge that he was just another pornographer doing dirt on sex was to claim that at least he had never made the subject predictable or boring. He denounced Lady Chatterbox’s Lover — his title for Lawrence’s notorious novel — as a ‘lush’ production in ‘sloppy English’ and dismissed its ending as ‘a piece of propaganda in favour of something which, outside of DHL’s country at any rate, makes all the propaganda for itself’. It is a minor irony of literary history that both men were married at Kensington Register Office in London, although, unlike Lawrence, the Irishman allowed a decent interval of twenty-five years to elapse before the solemnisation of his nuptials.
xxx/ellauri085.html on line 389: It’s a strange irony that a phrase made up to slander rich people, is actually dead on accurate.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 635: Writing to his sister Alice, James characterized Zhukovski as “the same impracticable and indeed ridiculous mixture of Nihilism and bric-à-brac as before.” He adds that Zhukovski always needs to be sheltered by a strong figure: “First he was under Turgenev, then the Princess Urusov, whom he now detests and who despises him, then under H.J. Jr. (!!), then under that of a certain disagreeable Onegin (the original of Turgenev’s Nazhdanov, in Virgin Soil) now under Wagner, and apparently in the near future that of Madame Wagner.” Novick bypasses these letters; he avoids looking at facts that might spoil his case. He does allude to the James remark about Zhukovski’s bric-a-brac, but he seems to misunderstand its irony. He claims that James was “cautious” about this visit because of crime and disease in the Naples area–all this, says Novick, is “out of keeping with the collection of bric-à-brac with which Zhukovski was surrounded.” James may indeed have been referring to the villa’s human bric-a-brac.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 648: Hemingway makes explicit here the themes of irony and pity: the irony of Kake's situation (he is a kind of superman who nevertheless can't perform the most basic of manly activities, namely fucking) as well as the pity "we" (who have our penises in working order) feel for him. The writer does so in an extended section, rich with dialogue, that is meant to be funny but has not dated well. The joking between Kake and Bill, over breakfast and later at lunch, is certainly believable as such, but it's difficult for a contemporary audience to follow, because the references to Frankie Fritsch and so forth have grown obscure with the passage of time. (The reference to Bryan's death tells us exactly when these scenes are occurring: 1925.) Do note, however, that Kake's physical condition is alluded to — and quickly backed away from. ("I'd a hell of a lot rather not talk about it" could be the motto of Kake's stoic take on the world, while Hemingway's would be "I want to talk about it all the time".) The writer has established, however, that Kake's condition is not simple impotence (rather it is loss of limb, or shortening of the joystick) and that it was caused by an accident.
xxx/ellauri187.html on line 195: Getting to the point wasn’t exactly Rilke’s forte. It may not be fair to expect that of any poet, especially one born in 1875 and swimming in the currents of the Symbolists. Rilke’s flowery — and daresay twee — verses do not jibe with today’s tastes for cut-and-dry clarity, blasé irony, and Tweet-able brevity. But that’s precisely why Rilke is enjoying somewhat of a posthumous comeback. He offers what Twitter can’t.
xxx/ellauri200.html on line 180: In awarding Naipaul the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy praised his work "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." Kukahan tonkin runoili, olikohan kulturpersonligheten. The Committee added: "Naipaul is a modern philosopher carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony." The Committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the novelist Joseph Conrad (toinen kaappikolonialisti pyllypää):
xxx/ellauri280.html on line 422: Palkinto tuli pistämättömästä mutta myötätuntoisesta penetraatiosta. Gurnah has criticized the practices in both British and American publishing that want to "make the alien seem alien" by marking "foreign" terms and phrases with italics or by putting them in a glossary. Onkos se joku ylläri. Felicity Hand observes that Gurnah´s characters typically do not succeed abroad following their migration, using irony and humour to respond to their situation. Talk to the hand. The first translator of his novels into Swahili, academic Dr Ida Hadjivayanis of the School of Oriental and African Studies, has said: "I think if his work could be read in East Africa it would have such an impact. ... maybe fewer coons would try to swim over to the West." Gurnah was the first Black writer to receive the prize since 1993, when Toni Morrison won it, and the first African writer since 1991, when Nadine Gordimer was the recipient, making him the first black guy to make it.
xxx/ellauri307.html on line 733: gravitated away from religion. The irony is that I've since then really come full
xxx/ellauri354.html on line 281: Indeed, as Rinaldi claims, The Black Pig “tells you about those priests” (FTA 8). And it is easy enough to see why the priest thought it “a filthy and vile book.” But Rinaldi’s complaint, that it “shook my faith” (7), needs to be read in the context of everything else we know of this character. If Rinaldi is a real believer—which I doubt—he would disdain Notari’s book, which, although heavily documented, is dripping with scorn, irony, and bias. But if his faith is automatic and largely irrelevant, or if it has already been shaken, he might have read on, attracted by Notari’s wide reading, his witty, strong prose, and his relentlessly rationalist logic, sometimes reminiscent of MarkTwain.
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