| Focusing on both the genre of the novel in the Western tradition and on the activity of reading novels, this dissertation develops a reading strategy---based on what is defined as complex irony---and then applies it to four twentieth-century novels that clearly manifest moral and aesthetic values and that engage us, as readers, in what may be termed moral and aesthetic realms: Camus's The Plague, Mann's Doctor Faustus, Grass's The Tin Drum, and Kosinski's The Painted Bird. This study explains why traditional concepts and familiar taxonomies of irony like those found in works by, for example, Wayne Booth (A Rhetoric of Irony ) and D.C. Muecke (Irony and the Ironic) are not sufficient in themselves for what we might call the postmodern challenges and demands, as well as insights, that current theory and criticism impose on readers of novels. This study draws from the writings of Thomas Mann whose view of irony is close to complex irony. He, however, is primarily concerned with the irony of the artist. This dissertation is more inclusive in its theory of complex irony than is Mann.; Complex irony has its roots in the German Romantics, particularly in the works of Friedrich Schlegel, who transformed the commonly held view of irony as a rhetorical device into a more complex philosophical and aesthetic concept. Schlegel's positive and communal concept of irony directly opposes more negative views of irony like those held earlier by Kierkegaard and Hegel and more recently by deconstructionists like Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. Complex irony is way of perceiving that depends on an awareness of two worlds: one made possible by human imagination and one we ordinarily think of as the empirical or actual world. Complex irony is also means of recognizing and dealing with both ontological and epistemological questions that arise any time readers consider the relationship of literature and life.; Deconstruction stands out from the thicket of postmodern theory and criticism as a useful and important heuristic in this dissertation for several reasons. As an important recent formulation and announcement of a crisis of meaning, deconstruction claims as its source the relationship (or the perceived lack of it) between language and the world. Additionally, its major creators, like Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, have appropriated and retooled the concept of irony for their own agendas, and along the way linked it to their animadversions on metaphor, the lifeblood and sine qua non for literature. In building its case for complex irony, this dissertation lends perspective to deconstruction and its epigones as it draws not only from the recent critical and theoretical landscape but also from a larger context that takes us back across the centuries from the present to Plato and Aristotle. In the process, we see how moral and aesthetic questions, including questions about language and its limitations, as well as questions about the self, have arisen and been dealt with by thinkers and writers who fall under categories that include poet, philosopher, aesthetician, critic, theorist, novelist, anthropologist, and essayist. |
