The Force Of Irony

Winner of the 'Casa Chata Award' for the Best Book of 1994 (Spanish edition)In charting the paradoxical effects of power and knowledge on the everyday life of subordinate people, this book offers a major rethinking of domination and the agricultural labor process. Challenging the belief that ethnography is theoretically weak, the author provides a fresh perspective on rural workers' responses to the development of transnational production systems and the transformations of agrarian structures brought about by the complex interactions of global and local forces. In questioning ingrained assumptions about worker consciousness, the author exposes the naivete of past approaches and the role of power and hegemony in the micro-politics of human relations. This book is obligatory reading for anyone interested in current debates about "resistance," development, and the future of rural societies.

First published in 1969, The Compass of Irony is a detailed study of the nature, qualities, classifications, and significance of irony. Divided into two parts, the book offers first a general account of the formal qualities of irony and a classification of the more familiar kinds. It then explores newer forms of irony, its functions, topics, and cultural significance. A wide variety of examples are drawn from a range of different authors, such as Musil, Diderot, Schlegel, and Thomas Mann. The final chapter considers the detachment and seeming superiority of the ironist and discusses what this means for the morality of irony. The Compass of Irony will appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of irony as both a literary and a cultural phenomenon.

Table of contents

This book offers fresh perspectives on untruthfulness entailed in various forms of irony, deception and humour, which have so far constituted independent foci of linguistic and philosophical investigation. These three distinct (albeit sometimes co-occurring) notions are brought together within a neo-Gricean framework and consistently discussed as representing overt or covert untruthfulness. The postulates that represent the interface between language philosophy and pragmatics are illustrated with scripted interactions culled from the series House, which help appreciate the complexities of the three concepts at hand. Apart from affording new insights into the nature of irony, deception and humour, this book critically examines previous literature on these notions, as well as relevant aspects of Grice's philosophy of language. Giving a state-of-the-art picture of untruthfulness, this publication will be of interest to both experienced and inexperienced researchers studying Grice’s philosophy, irony, deception and/or humour.

Irony today extends beyond its classification as a figure of speech and is increasingly recognized as one of the major modes of human experience. This idea of irony as an integral force in social life is at the center of this provocative book. The result of a meeting where anthropologists were invited to explore the politics of irony and the moral responsibilities that accompany its recognition, this book is one of the first to lend an anthropological perspective to this contemporary phenomenon. The first group of essays explores the limits to irony's liberating qualities from the constrained use of irony in congressional hearings to its reactive presence amid widening disparities of wealth despite decades of world development. The second section presents irony's more positive dimensions through an array of examples such as the use of irony by Chinese writers and Irish humorists. Framed by the editors' theoretical introduction to the issues posed by irony and responses to the essays by two literary scholars, Irony in Action is a timely contribution in the contemporary reinvention of anthropology.

Intra-Jewish conflict in Paul's communities After taking on traditional interpretations of Romans in (The Mystery of Romans, Nanos now turns his attention to the Letter to the Galatians. A Primary voice in reclaiming Paul in his Jewish context. Nanos challenges the previously dominant views of Paul as rejecting his Jewish heritage and the Law. Where Paul's rhetoric has been interpreted to be its most anti-Jewish, Nanos instead demonstrates the implications of an intra-Jewish reading. He explores the issues of purity, insiders/outsiders; the charactor of "the gospel"; the relationship between groups of Christ-followers in Jerusalem, Antioch, and Galatia; and evil-eye accusations.

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Sophisticated and engaging, this volume explores and compares musical irony in the works of major composers, from Mozart to Mahler.