In this essay, the use of postmodern rhetorical irony as a subversive strategy is explored. In particular, Susan Dorothea White's painting, The First Supper, is analyzed as a subversive, postmodern ironic reading of Leonardo da Vinci's famed work, The Last Supper. This analysis suggests that subversive irony assumes distinctive and complex technical and theoretical characteristics, most relevan...

irony is considered as a rhetorical device that is used more frequently than trope and metaphor. consequently, in spite of all their disagreements in defining irony varieties over centuries, rhetoricians have made significant efforts and have left some conspicuous works about it. al-kashāf al-zamakhshari commentary is the most well-known source of rhetorical interpretation that is referred to i...

Sarcasm and irony, although similar, differ in that sarcasm has an impact on sentiment (because it is used to ridicule a target) while irony does not. Past work treats the two interchangeably. In this paper, we wish to validate if sarcasm versus irony classification is indeed a challenging task. To this end, we use a dataset of quotes from English literature, and conduct experiments from two pe...

Situational irony concerns what it is about a situation that causes people to describe it as ironic. Although situational irony is as complex and commonplace as verbal and literary irony, it has received nowhere near the same attention from cognitive scientists and other scholars. This paper presents the bicoherence theory of situational irony, based on the theory of conceptual coherence (Kunda...

This paper explores the risks and reward of ironic communication. We argue that irony can not be characterized simply as having positive or negative social impact, but can serve multiple communicative purposes, depending on the social context and aims of the conversational participants. Irony may either distance, or bond, speakers and listeners. Contrary to the standard view, understanding iron...

Irony is perceived through a complex interaction between an utterance and its context and serves many social functions such as to be sarcastic and to be humorous. The purpose of this paper is to explore what role linguistic style and contextual information play in the recognition of irony (i.e., assessing the degree of irony) and in the appreciation of ironic functions (i.e., assessing the degr...