ABSTRACT
Some years ago, I was presenting the bones of this book’s content in a faculty colloquium at the college where I teach. When I was done and the time came for questions, one of my colleagues from my very own English department raised his hand. Was it really possible, he asked, with something close to incredulity (if not outright disbelief), that the films I was talking about exhibited virtually no signs of irony? To him, as an individual who had devoted his professional career to literature, particularly to American modernists like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, a lack of irony seemed inconceivable.
