Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

11.3 Mechanisms of irony
Unit 11 Irony
Section 3 Attributing meaning

What makes verbal irony different from lying? A person who speaks or writes communicates both a proposition and his or her attitude towards that proposition. In both verbal irony and lying, the communicator has an attitude of disbelief towards the proposition. In verbal irony that attitude of disbelief is made clear (by various signals), while in lying the disbelief is concealed. For irony to be successful, the audience/readership must be able to recognize that there is a true attitude of disbelief towards a proposition expressed by the text. In principle, any kind of evidence might be used to indicate that there is a true attitude of disbelief towards the proposition; in this section we briefly consider some of the more common kinds of evidence.

One kind of evidence involves a contradiction between what the text tells us and what we already know. Unless there is good reason to abandon our previous beliefs, we will therefore adopt an attitude of disbelief towards the text. This is not enough on its own to give rise to irony, though: on its own, this might just generate a decision that the author has made a mistake. Thus we must be convinced that the author also shares the beliefs that we brought to the text. A second kind of evidence for irony comes from exaggeration and overemphasis, including hyperbole, emphatic (insincere) statements of belief, extensive use of superlatives, or exaggerations in speaking (as in typical sarcasm). Overemphasis functions to communicate the irony in the quote from Jane Austen with which we began.

Overstatement is an instance of a more general way in which a text signals the presence of irony, which is by some kind of disruption. In most texts it is possible to distinguish the normal characteristics of the text from the disruptive characteristics. In a rhyming poem, the rhymes are the default case and any failure to rhyme would be disruptive; in prose, a rhyme would be disruptive where rhyme is not expected. (The terms ’unmarked’ and ’marked’ are sometimes used to characterize the normal and disruptive elements of the text, respectively). Looking for disruptions in a text is always a useful way of entering into and beginning to understand the workings of a text, and the manipulation of disruptions can be a powerful communicative tool. To indicate the presence of irony, the text can be disrupted in various ways. Internal inconsistency is one kind of disruption that is fairly characteristic of irony. A common example of this second type is where the register of the text changes unexpectedly; in this case, we say that the voice of the text is inconsistent. In Henry Reed’s poem ’Naming of Parts’ (1946), there are at least two registers: some of the lines are spoken as if by a military instructor and some as if by a dreamy romantic. Yet there is no explicit change of speaker. In this case, the irony comes from the fact that the two registers express different attitudes that contradict one another and yet the whole poem seems to come from a single source; thus one attitude must be false.