Review: Irony’s Antics: Walser, Kafka, Roth, and the German Comic Tradition by Erica Weitzman
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Issue Date
2017Author
Linden, Ari
Publisher
Wiley
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, author accepted manuscript
Rights
© 2017, American Association of Teachers of German
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Show full item recordAbstract
In the closing chapter of Irony’s Antics, Erica Weitzman tries to steer her readers away from three misreadings of irony that have informed most of its modern interpretations: the “utopian/romantic,” the “melancholic/modernist,” and the “sentimental/humanist” (187). Each of these variants is, for Weitzman, decidedly anti-ironic and therefore antithetical to the modern tradition of “comic irony” that she illuminates in select works by Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, and Josepth Roth. Combining philosophical erudition with close and considered literary readings, Weitzman insists that what is genuinely modern—and genuinely ironic—about these works is their ludic and boundless self-consciousness, the most faithful embodiment of irony as such.
Description
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Linden, Ari. Review: Erica Weitzman, Irony’s Antics: Walser, Kafka, Roth, and the German Comic Tradition (Northwestern 2015). The German Quarterly (90:2, 2017): 244-246., which has been published in final form at http://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12034. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.
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Citation
Linden, Ari. Review: Erica Weitzman, Irony’s Antics: Walser, Kafka, Roth, and the German Comic Tradition (Northwestern 2015). The German Quarterly (90:2, 2017): 244-246.
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