Frank D'Angelo depicts the history of composition as a "movement from metaphorical identification, to metonymic displacement, to synecdochic part/whole and genus/species relationships," to its present state of "ironic detachment and reflection . . ." (99). Likewise, Hayden White suggests that irony is the pervading gestalt of our postmodern age. As a master trope, irony
reflects a doubt in the capacity of language itself to render adequately what perception gives and thought constructs about the nature of reality. . . . It is suspicious of all formulas, and it delights in exposing the paradoxes contained in every attempt to capture experience in language. (232-33)
Certainly, irony permeates our culture most explicitly in the popular forums of advertising and comedy and iterates our general cynicism about government, business, and the academy. Such representative television shows as Rosanne and Saturday Night Live and advertisements such as those for Little Caesar's pizza utilize irony by juxtaposing incongruities to amuse, outrage, and sell. However, irony's evasive character clouds its societal and classroom roles.
Writing instructors from across the ideological spectrum have acknowledged the influence of popular culture on writing and literacy (McRae; Aronowitz; Boyd). And, because of its position in the popular media, irony represents a preeminent component of contemporary epistemology. However, irony presents difficulties when considered in the classroom context. Unlike the metaphor or simile, irony requires interpreting what is not meant, addressing a text in which the relationship between the signified and the signifier is particularly unclear. Nevertheless, because of irony's preeminent place in the postmodern zeitgeist, we should consider the value of instructing writers in the dynamics of this problematic trope.
Even though students are surrounded by irony, they would be hard-put to define it. Any instruction in irony per se has most likely been in the literature class, where, even here, irony is difficult to teach. Some students may label Jonathan Swift's reductio ad absurdum in "A Modest Proposal" as "sarcasm" or the work of a "smart aleck," but considerably fewer would describe him as "ironic" simply because they do not understand the intricate textual play involved in creating irony. Irony requires a deliberate, twofold act involving the writer's projecting a text for the audience's ensuing active and critical interpretation. That is, the writer must deliberately convey a meaning different but not necessarily opposite from what is intended. Yet the author must also have a specific interpretative aim, and the reader must reconstruct according to the author's intended meaning (Booth 5-6). Lori Chamberlain facetiously suggests that the popularity of irony began in the late nineteenth century as a prelude to the "spiritual vacuum" and decadence of the modern era (30). On a less radical note, Walter Ong views irony as symbolizing the decline of mimesis, the trademark of an oral culture with its metaphorical language. Ong asserts that an ironic orldview is more attuned to the detached, objective world of print than to a "participatory" oral culture: "The ironist is known to be cold-blooded, more like a Platonic idealist than a warm-blooded participant in life" (30).
As a political and social construct, irony is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it purveys an intrinsic mean-spiritedness because it is, by nature, exclusive. Because there are no prescriptive instructions to reconstructing an ironic text, it can be interpreted "with meanings ifferent from those on the surface, not merely overt statements . . ." (Booth 6). An ironic text is reassembled according to the social precepts of the audience, automatically establishing a group in "ins" and "outs." David Wallace suggests that the outs' realization that they are indeed out is part of the ironic situation: "Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig" (184). Likewise, Chamberlain points out that irony, unlike other tropes, "invokes notions of hierarchy and subordination, judgment and perhaps even moral superiority" (29). She further asserts that the decision to teach irony is a "political gesture" because of irony's implied scheme of inclusion and exclusion.
However, irony also provides an inherent corrective action within the very media that engender it because irony facilitates an exclusivity among otherwise marginalized social and cultural groups. While the perpetual media portrayals of success and happiness may simply reinforce this marginalization, advertising's ironic overlay also compensates the "outs." When Nike tells the world's would-be Shaquelle O'Neals many of them inner-city kids to "Just Do It," those who can identify the explicitly implicit "it" automatically join a select group by virtue of nothing but their understanding of the ad's implied message. Similarly, a recent beer ad coerces the reader with "If you get it, get it." In this context, simply recognizing "it" transports the reader beyond the uninitiated and into the sanctum of the informed.
To introduce irony within a classroom context, I have my students compare several advertisements from popular magazines from the 1950's or early 60's with ads from a current issue of the same magazine. This task is difficult because, although they immediately perceive differences between the two ads, the students encounter difficulty expressing what initially strikes them as obvious. Almost without exception, the students describe the older ads as somehow awkward or labored in their expression. They note that the older ads often contain a great deal of copy, and the product itself is usually foregrounded, often complemented by well-dressed, smiling models. However, beyond terming these ads "corny" or "stupid," students have difficulty expressing why they find this ad ineffective or artificial.
The missing ingredient in the early ad is irony or, at the least, a subtext that subtly addresses the viewer's wants, needs, and goals. The smiling families climbing into their new 1962 Buick represent an Eisenhower-era innocence that students recognize as artificial and ontrived. They are similarly put off by the innocently hard-sell copy: "Drive away in a Buick." Students are more attuned with the subversive sexuality of Guess jeans and Marlboro cigarettes with their emphasis of symbols over typed copy to create a pervasive but non-verbal message. Such ads utilize the irony that White defines as both "sophisticated and realistic," reflecting a culture that has experienced "the ascent of thought in a given area of inquiry to a level of self-consciousness on which a genuinely 'enlightened' that is to say, self-critical conceptualization of the world and its processes has become possible" (37).
Within the classroom context, irony fosters an unusual and difficult relationship between the writer and reader. Most composition texts emphasize at some point "clear, concise writing." Although we might argue about what constitutes such writing, the reader/writer relationship is nevertheless complicated when the audience is required to second guess the writer or to undertake a reciprocal interpretation of a text. Furthermore, introducing freshman writers to irony seems to complicate an already impossible task. We strive to instruct our students in proficient communication, insisting that they clarify and develop a point, and we discourage digressions and red herrings. However, ironic writing is not mere rambling. It requires writers to say what they do not mean, to reconstruct a complete text that is, essentially, an untruth. The reader, then, is compelled to decipher the text's code, to conclude that the writer is indeed "lying" and then to view the text through a looking glass.
The rationale for addressing irony in the classroom is equally compelling: students need to understand that which they intuitively perceive throughout their culture. They may have difficulty initially defining irony or interpreting a subtext, but they certainly recognize the subversiveness and "humor" of Beavis and Butthead. They know that no one is supposed to act like these characters, and that knowledge adds to the appeal. Students are already apt at spotting phonies, and, even if they do not appreciate the textual components of irony, their aforementioned skill in identifying artificiality suggests that they indeed recognize incongruous elements.
Furthermore, teaching irony can bring about the kind of inquiry necessary for a more inclusive discourse. Certainly, irony has unusual manipulative powers, as suggested by my students who recognized, but could not necessarily describe, the compelling qualities in the modern advertisement as opposed to the more straightforward, but less "realistic," earlier one. (The ironic advertisement reflects T.S. Eliot's observation that poetry can "communicate without being understood.") The persuasion is especially effective and possibly more sinister because it is unrecognized. If we regard teaching as "empowering" students in the Frierian sense, then we are obliged to address irony because of the dangers of not doing so. If we hold that teaching composition is a political act, then irony, the most "political" of tropes, is by its very nature an important component of a composition class.
In a similar yet gentler vein, Chamberlain, pointing to Kierkegaard's regard for irony's "restorative powers," posits that attention to irony can lead to a mastery of one's world:
Because it depends on a dissimulation the pretense of saying one thing and meaning another irony is associated with the general misuse of rhetoric; but because of its self-reflexivity, it is also associated with the critical spirit of self-consciousness, of dialectical inquiry. (31)
If the contemporary consciousness is based on reflexivity, on continual and increasing self-awareness, then it follows that irony is as much a part of contemporary discourse as are narratives, descriptions, and arguments.
I return to the heuristic of advertising to illustrate an effective classroom exercise in analysis of irony. A written explication of an advertisement helps students discern White's "self-critical" irony and understand the implicit, yet powerful, qualities of an ad's subtext. In one such assignment, I present an ad featuring a broken bottle of Crown Royal Scotch, its contents spilling out among the slivers, with the simple caption: "Have you ever seen a grown man cry?" With a little coaching, students can distinguish several assumptions that coalesce into an implicit quasi-syllogism. The first assumption is that a grown man is not supposed to cry, and if he does, the reason must be intensely compelling. Secondly, the broken bottle suggests an accident. Within this context, then, students understand the message emanating from the picture and brief caption: Crown Royal is such a fine product that a grown man will breach cultural norms and cry if he breaks his bottle. The conclusion and the ultimate irony is grounded in a suspension of disbelief in which reader concludes that a man would cry over a broken bottle of Scotch. The product's quality has been exaggerated to an absurd degree. However, because the reader has reconstructed the ad, the message is humorous and thus, feasible and effective.
A written analysis of this ad requires that the student employ the twofold explication of irony as described above. The writer must first analyze the elements in the ad, namely, the images and copy. Then one must assess the immediate context: "What has happened?" or "What is happening?" Next, the writer must determine the ad's surface message. With the ad in question, one might decide that "A man has broken his bottle of Crown Royal and is now crying." It only takes a couple of such exercises before students are searching out their own ads and identifying the ironic components.
Such an explication reflects Donald Lazere's admonition that composition should raise the level of thinking from the "receptive" to the "interpretative." Lazere proposes a writing course based on a General Semantics model of "definition, denotation, and connotation" in which writers explore and interpret languages's inherent biases (38). Although Lazere's specific objectives are driven by political discourse, his overriding thesis is to address students' inherent linguistic and cultural biases. Interpreting irony divulges these biases to students by giving students a free hand to exercise, then analyze, their own interpretations within their cultural contexts.
Some twenty-five years ago, Alvin Toffler addressed the social implications of an impending "information overload" that must be evaluated as to its acceptability and "truth." Information words, texts, images has become a commodity, something to be hoarded, bought, and sold. This proliferation of information loosens the connections between words and their meanings, so the occasion for ironic relationships is furthered. Within the classroom, students, immersed in the information age, can understand the manipulative powers of language. As we contend with such pedagogical and social issues as literacy, correctness, and inclusion, we will repeatedly encounter irony as a self-perpetuating trope demanding attentive analysis.