How to Recover Reality. Neo-Romantic Irony in Post-Postmodern American Fiction

Even though transcendentalism never ceased to be present in American culture, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the gaze of artists and theorists turned to the ideas of the American Renaissance with a hope that had no place during the reign of postmodern irony. With this in mind, the purpose of this article is to discern the adequacy of Emerson’s philosophy for the recovery of realism through the transcendence of language and a new use of Romantic irony. The previous analysis will take us to the New Sincerity movement. The writers of the generation that followed in the wake of David Foster Wallace’s acted as a bridge between the postmodern and the post-postmodern narrative of the beginning of the new millennium. These young writers based their fiction on a critique of institutionalized irony in order to pave the way for the new post 9/11 novel.

Reconstructing Realism in Post-Postmodern Narrative: Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

By analysing Dave Eggers’s autofictional work A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, this article attempts to reveal the role of this author in the post-postmodern narrative of the turn of the millennium. Following in the wake of David Foster Wallace, Eggers’s solution to overcome the problems created by postmodernism is a kind of writing based on honesty. Through a rebirth of the author, the objective of Eggers’s New Sincerity is the democratization of narrative in order to create a sensibility network aimed at ending the solipsism brought about by postmodern linguistic relativism. However, this new sensibility is reminiscent of pre-postmodern fundamentalism. The use of meta-metafiction based on the use of neo-Romantic irony enables Eggers to create an escape valve that allows for the creation of a metamodern oscillation—as described by Tim Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker.

The Contraries’ Progression: Romantic irony in the introductory poems of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience

In the vast bibliography on William Blake, scholars usually comment on the irony in his poetic works, but seldom they explain such comments. This paper is an attempt to understand the ironies present in some poems of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, while at the same time taking into consideration the dialectical quality of Blake’s thought. To do so, the concept of Romantic irony, developed by Friedrich Schlegel, is used, as it is also dialectical in its nature. In order to illustrate how Romantic irony is used to read the volume, an analysis of the introductory poems of each section, along with “Earth’s Answer” (the second introduction’s coda) and two plates which illustrate these poems, is made. The readings show some affinities between Blake’s and Schlegel’s way of thinking.

J. Offenbach’s opera “The Tales of Hoffmann”: on the question of interpretation. Part 1

The opera by Jacques Offenbach “The Tales of Hoffmann” is a unique phenomenon in the history of the opera genre attracting the attention of interpreters and researchers. Dealing with the text, musicians face particular problems caused by an unusual story behind the opera and its other peculiarities. The purpose of this article is to study the specificity of the opera at the literary, music, and stage levels using  the hermeneutical approach. The three independent original works of Hoffmann were combined in a grand drama composed by J. Barbier and M. Carré, and then in a libretto (J. Barbier) by means of deconstruction of romantic stereotypes of the main character, which reveals the peculiarities of the opera under consideration and explains the topicality of this research. The music analysis is aimed at the detection of expressive means through which the composer had managed to explain the idea of the authors of the literary text and get it across to the audience. The key formative way of building a music drama is a “romantic irony” (M. Ya. Kuklinskaya). That’s where the genre dualism of the opera under consideration comes from, which manifested itself in the form of the synthesis of the genres opera comique and opera lyrique. The authors also detect the interaction of elements of both genres helping to create an unusual atmosphere of the opera, and the play with the audience, allowing manipulating the spectators’ expectations, which is more typical of operetta than of opera genre.   

Linguistic aspect of Søren Kierkegaard’s “Indirect communication” with continual reference to romantic irony

The subject of this article is the language of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. The article presents a classification (based on the material of the treatise Repetition) of rhetorical devices specific for this author. This classification relies on the thesis that Romanticism was the cultural and historical context of Kierkegaard’s background which influenced his language and style, and that Kierkegaard’s method of indirect communication became in a certain sense a legacy of romantic irony defined by Friedrich Schlegel as “the form of paradox”. Categorizing Kierkegaard as a descendant of Romanticism makes it possible to classify his main stylistic techniques under the term “contradiction”, which means a conscious and even intentional use of different stylistic and conceptual oppositions in the collision of which the author’s thought is revealed. Three types of contradictions can be distinguished in the text of Repetition. (1) The first one is intertextual contradiction between two works. Publishing his books under different pseudonyms, Kierkegaard creates such a situation as though two authors argue with each other. (2) The second one is conceptual contradiction within one work. Kierkegaard confronts in the treatise two opposite characters and two opposite concepts of repetition. (3) And the last type of contradiction are linguistic contradictions consisting of all the stylistic devices that Kierkegaard uses to activate his method of indirect communication and which can be defined as “wordplay” in the most general sense: as playful and witty use of words. Kierkegaard uses puns, different figures of repetition and parallelism, and these stylistic devices take form of contradiction in order to express the fundamental contradictory of life in an ironic and witty form. In such a “struggle” of oppositions, not only an ironic intonation is created, but also the meaning of concepts is revealed in their true-life fullness.