Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice is one of the most famous and widely read texts in all of modern literature, raising such issues as beauty and decadence, eros and irony, and aesthetics and morality.
Irony and Humor: From pragmatics to discourse is a complete updated panorama of linguistic research on irony and humor, based on a variety of perspectives, corpora and theories. The book collects the most recent contributions from such diverse approaches as Relevance Theory, Cognitive Linguistics, General Theory of Verbal Humor, Neo-Gricean Pragmatics or Argumentation. The volume is organized in three parts referring to pragmatic perspectives, mediated discourse, and conversational interaction. This book will be highly relevant for anyone interested in pragmatics, discourse analysis as well as social sciences.
In her book, Barbe discusses verbal irony as an interpretative notion. Verbal irony is described in its various realizations and thus placed within linguistics and pragmatics. From the point of view of an analyzing observer, Barbe provides an eclectic approach to irony in context, a study of how conversational irony works, and how it compares with other concepts in which it plays a role. In addition, by means of the analysis of irony as an integrated pervasive feature of language, Barbe questions some basic unstated, literacy and culture-dependent assumptions about language. Her study of irony complements contemporary research in the area of conversational analysis.
This is the way Vladimir Nabokow's Laughter In The Dark begins: 'Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.' And he starts from here, with his characteristic dazzling skill and irony, and cleverly turns a fable into a chilling, original novel of folly and destruction.
