ABSTRACT
Attempts to theorize irony usually begin with some semantic definition of irony as involving saying one thing and meaning another. While the next chapter will deal with this obviously important relationship between the said and the unsaid, there seems to me to be something else that characterizes irony even more particularly, something that makes it even more distinctively different from other figures of speech, from other rhetorical strategies or structural devices: what I’ve been calling its “edge.” Unlike metaphor or metonymy, irony has an edge; unlike incongruity or juxtaposition, irony can put people on edge; unlike paradox, irony is decidedly edgy. While it may come into being through the semantic playing off of the stated against the unstated, irony is a “weighted” mode of discourse in the sense that it is asymmetrical, unbalanced in favor of the silent and the unsaid. The tipping of the balance occurs in part through what is implied about the attitude of either the ironist or the interpreter: irony involves the attribution of an evaluative, even judgmental attitude, and this is where the emotive (Meyers 1974: 173) or affective dimension also enters—much to the dismay of most critical discourse and most critics.
