Chic Ironic Bitterness

Notes

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Portions of these examples excerpted from “Silva Rhetoricae,” compiled by Gideon O. Burton at humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/Figures/I/irony.html. 2. Stephen Colbert on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, National Public Radio, January 24, 2005. 3. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates, trans. Lee M. Capel (London: Collins, 1966), 265. 4. Elise Harris, “In‹nite Jest,” The Nation, week of March 2, 2000. 5. Benjamin Anastas, “Irony Scare: How Did A Literary Device Become A Public Enemy?” The New Republic Online, May 18, 1999, www.tnr.com/online/ anastas051801.html. 6. Anastas, “Irony Scare.” 7. Rodger D. Hodge, “Thus Spoke Jedediah,” Harper’s, September 1999, 84. 8. When looking for the tradition of witty satirists in America, start here (alphabetically, not chronologically): William Austin (1778–1841); George W. Bagby (1828–83); Joseph Glover Baldwin (1815–64); Lewis Gaylord Clark (1810–73); Willis Gaylord Clark (1810–41); William Cox (?–1851); Frederick Swartout Cozzens (1818–69); David Crockett (1786–1836); Charles Augustus Davis (1795–1867); George Horatio Derby (1823–61); Samuel Griswold Goodrick (1793–1860); Joseph Green (1706–80); Asa Greene (1788–1837); Charles Graham Halpine (1829–68); Samuel A. Hammett (1816–65); George Washington Harris (1814–69); Johnson Jones Hooper (1815–62); John Pendelton Kennedy (1795–1870); David Ross Locke (1833–88); Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790–1870); John Ludlum McConnel (1826–62); Cornelius Matthews (1817–89); George Pope Morris (1802–64); Robert Henry Newell (1836–1901); Henry Junius Nott (1797–1837); George Denison Prentice (1802–70); John Sanderson (1783–1844); John Godfrey Saxe (1816–87); Henry Wheeler Shaw (1818–85); Seba Smith (1792–1868); William Tappan Thompson (1812–82); John Trumbull (1750–1831); Nathaniel Ward [1578(?)–1652]; Mrs. Frances Miriam Berry Whitcher (1811–52); Henry Augustus Wise (1819–69). The above collated from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, 18 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907–21). 235 9. Marc and Marque-Luisa Miringoff, The Social Health of the Nation: How America is Really Doing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). CHAPTER 1 1. Roger Rosenblatt, “The Age of Irony Comes to An End: No Longer Will We Fail To Take Things Seriously,” Time, September 20, 2001. 2. Rosenblatt, “Age of Irony.” 3. Blurb from The Onion’s book Dispatches From the Tenth Circle (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001). 4. Bill Carter, “CNN Will Cancel Cross‹re and Cut Ties to Commentator,” New York Times, January 6, 2005. 5. John Colapinto, “The Most Trusted Name In News,” Rolling Stone, October 28, 2004. 6. William Chaloupka, Everybody Knows: Cynicism in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 45. 7. Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Lost Their Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 208. 8. See Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1992) for a sociologically powerful overview of how and why this happened in the twentieth century. 9. David M. Halb‹nger, “ABC Tells Robin Williams: Drop Comic Song from Oscars,” The New York Times News Service, Philadelphia Inquirer, February 27, 2005, A12. 10. Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor, Escape Attempts: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 1992), 47–48. 11. Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (New York: Vintage , 2000), in the unnumbered “Acknowledgments” section. 12. David Foster Wallace from the Review of Contemporary Fiction quoted in Robert Fulford’s “Column About Irony” in the Canadian Globe and Mail, September 18, 1999. 13. Wyatt Mason, “My Satirical Self,” New York Times Magazine, August 17, 2006. 14. Robert Storr, “The Rules of the Game,” in Alex Katz: American Landscape (Baden-Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle Verlag, 1995), 27. 15. Peter N. Stearns. American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 300. 16. Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (New York: Lexington, 1992), 8. 17. Ernst Behler, Irony and the Discourse of Modernity (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990), 112. Notes to Pages 10–53 236 18. Christopher Lasch, The Miminal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 96. 19. Alan Wilde, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 16. 20. David Worcester, The Art of Satire (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 75. 21. See “The Metropolis and Mental Life...