Review: Irony’s Antics: Walser, Kafka, Roth, and the German Comic Tradition by Erica Weitzman

Abstract

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.