Divine Madness: On Interpreting Literatures, Music, and the Visual Arts Ironically

By Lars Elleström

Divine Madness provides a theory that enables the concept of irony to be transferred from the literary to the visual and aural domains. Two stories are being told. One is a story of how literary conceptualization has conquered the fields of the other arts and the other is a story of how literary conceptualization, conversely, has been successively relativized. Ellestr m provides a survey of the historical roots of the concept of irony as well as a discussion of two hermeneutical "options" irony as a mode of oral communication and irony as a mode of literary expression. The author examines how irony is classified and how it is used as an interpretive strategy rather than a "textual trait" intended by an author. Other concepts such as paradox, mysticism and deconstruction are also evaluated in terms of their relation to irony. Ellestr m concludes by demonstrating that ironic interpretations of not just music are intimately connected to norms, values, and even political stances that tend to be hidden behind an allegedly objective terminology - a terminology that has its roots in the comprehension of irony as an intentional, oral phenomenon.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1611481481
• ISBN13: 9781611481488
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Length: 307 Pages