ABSTRACT
You probably didn’t need Wittgenstein’s later writings to convince you that words evolve their meanings over extended periods of use in different and specific contexts. As Joseph A. Dane’s extensive historical review, The Critical Mythology of Irony (1991), shows, “irony” is no exception. These days, given the impact of poststructuralist theories of the impossibility of univocal and stable meaning, irony has achieved a somewhat privileged status for some people: its overt production of meaning through deferral and difference has been seen to point to the problematic nature of all language (Fischer 1986: 224; Handwerk 1985: 12; de Man 1969; Mileur 1986: 336): from a purely semantic point of view, the ironic “solution” of plural and separate meanings—the said together with unsaid—held in suspension (like oil and water) might challenge any notion of language as having a direct one-to-one referential relation to any single reality outside itself. To discuss the semantics of irony, however, is inevitably to address a set of complex issues not only centering around the concept of plural meaning, but also involving things like the conditioning role of context and the attitudes and expectations of both ironist and interpreter. In short, the topic of this chapter—how irony “means”—is inescapably related to those that precede and follow it.
