and they say americans don’t understand irony


Socratic, romantic, nihilistic. Post modern. Honestly. Is there any wonder?

An Oxford professor once put it to me simply: Man invents wheel. Wheel rolls over man. Man dies. That’s irony. Not Alanis Morrisette.

Americans may not understand irony – Lord knows that’s the general European consensus, one I have pointed out to me on a daily basis – but I’m convinced those of us who don’t have never made an effort to do so in the first place. Either that, or we’re just way too optimistic. But that’s neither here nor there, really.

Me, I’m a polemical irony girl myself. Everything else is a shoddy imitation.

“Austen uses irony as a means of being understated. Swift, by contrast, uses irony for polemical purposes, conjuring grotesque images ironically (babies being eaten, mankind enslaved to the morally superior horse) in order to state his case (that the Irish were starving, that humanity was going to the dogs) ever more forcefully.The Guardian

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