Literary Terms #2
Irony & Tone
AP LITERATURE
Mrs. Demangos
from Perrine’s Literature Structure, Sound & Sense, 10th ed.,
Discovering Literature, and Sparksharts
Irony & Tone
Irony: A situation or a use of language
involving some kind of incongruity or
discrepancy.
 Writers use the technique of irony to
evoke laughter in the reader even as
they express significant insight into
human nature.

Irony

Irony should not be equated with sarcasm,
which is simply language one person uses to
belittle or ridicule another.
 Irony is more complex. Operating through
careful, often subtle indirection, irony helps to
critique the world in which we live by laughing
at the many varieties of human eccentricities
and folly.
Verbal Irony
The use of a statement that, by its
context, implies the opposite. For
example, in Shakespeare’s Julius
Caesar, Antony repeats, “Brutus is an
honorable man,” while clearly implying
that Brutus is dishonorable.
 Sarcasm is a particularly blunt form of
verbal irony.

Situational Irony
Most important for the fiction writer.
 The discrepancy is between
appearance and reality, or between
expectation and fulfillment, or between
what is and what would seem
appropriate.

Situational Irony

In “The Most Dangerous Game,” it is
ironic that Rainsford, “the celebrated
hunter,” should become the hunted, this
is a reversal of his expected and
appropriate role.
Situational Irony

In “The Destructors,” it is ironic that Old
Misery’s horoscope should read,
“Abstain from any dealings in first half of
week. Danger of serious crash,” for the
horoscope is valid in a sense that is
quite different from what the words
appear to indicate.
Dramatic Irony
In dramatic irony the contrast is
between what a character says or thinks
and what the readers knows to be true.
 The author lets the audience or reader
in on a character’s situation while the
character himself remains in the dark.

Dramatic Irony

With dramatic irony, the character’s
words or actions carry a significance
that the character is not aware of.
Dramatic Irony
When used in tragedy, dramatic irony is
called tragic irony.
 One example is in Sophocle’s Oedipus
Rex, when Oedipus vows to discover
his father’s murderer, not knowing, as
the audience does, that he himself is
the murderer.

Cosmic Irony
The perception of fate of the universe
as malicious or indifferent to human
suffering, which creates a painful
contrast between our purposeful activity
and its ultimate meaninglessness.
 Thomas Hardy’s novels abound in
cosmic irony.

Satire
A kind of literature that ridicules human
folly or vice with the purpose of bringing
about reform or of keeping others from
falling into similar folly or vice.
 It is ridicule, but it has a higher motive.

Horatian Satire

After the Roman satirist Horace: Satire
in which the voice is indulgent, tolerant,
amused, and witty. The speaker holds
up to gentle ridicule the absurdities and
follies of human beings, aiming at
producing in the reader not the anger of
a Juvenal, but a wry smile.
Horatian Satire
Alexander Pope's verse satires,
some of them directly modeled
upon Horace's work, are generally
Horatian in tone.
 Ex.: “The Rape of the Lock”

Horatian Satire
More examples:
 Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels,
George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World, C.S.Lewis’s
Screwtape Letters.

Juvenalian Satire

After the Roman satirist Juvenal:
Formal satire in which the speaker
attacks vice and error with contempt
and indignation. Juvenalian satire in its
realism and its harshness is in strong
contrast to Horatian satire.
Juvenalian Satire

In English, Samuel Johnson's
poems London (1738) and The
Vanity of Human Wishes (1749)
are both imitations of Juvenal, but
the satires of Jonathan Swift come
closer to Juvenal's
uncompromisingly disgusted tone.
Juvenalian Satire

Examples of Juvenalian satire:
Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,”
Samuel Johnson’s “London,”George
Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451,William Golding’s Lord
of the Flies, and Anthony Burgess’ A
Clockwork Orange
Sarcasm

Sarcasm is simply bitter or cutting
speech intended to wound the feelings
(it comes from a Greek word meaning to
tear the flesh).
Sarcasm? Irony? Satire?

Irony may be popularly confused with
sarcasm and satire because it is so
often used as their tool; but irony may
be used without either sarcastic or
satirical intent, and sarcasm and satire
may exist (though they do not usually)
without irony.
Sarcasm? Irony? Satire?

Ex: If a student says, “I don’t
understand,” and the teacher replies,
with a tone of heavy disgust in his voice,
“Well, I wouldn’t expect you to,” he is
being sarcastic but not ironic.
Sarcasm? Irony? Satire?

But if, after you have done particularly
well on an exam, and your teacher
hands out your test saying, “Here’s
some bad news for you: you all got A’s
and B’s!” he is being ironic but not
sarcastic.
Sarcasm? Irony? Satire?
Sarcasm is cruel, as a bully is cruel: it
intends to give hurt. Satire is both cruel
and kind, as a surgeon is cruel and
kind: it gives hurt in the interest of the
patient or of society.
 Irony is neither cruel or kind: it is simply
a device, like a surgeon’s scalpel, for
performing an operation more skillfully.

Hyperbole (Overstatement)
Overstatement, or hyperbole, is simply
exaggeration, but exaggeration in the
service of truth.
 It may be humorous, grave, fanciful or
restrained, convincing or unconvincing.

Hyperbole (Overstatement)

Tennyson’s “The Eagle”
“Close to the sun in lonely lands,”

Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence”
Understatement
Understatement, or saying less than
one means, may exist in what one says
or merely in how one says it.
 example: If, upon sitting down to a
loaded dinner plate, you say, “This
looks like a nice snack,” you are actually
stating less than the truth.

Understatement

Example: from Artemus Ward… but if
you say that a man who holds his hand
for half an hour in a lighted fire will
experience “a sensation of excessive
and disagreeable warmth.” you are
stating what is literally true but with a
good deal less force than the situation
warrants.
Litotes
A form of understatement in which a
statement is affirmed by negating its
opposite.
 Example: “He is not unfriendly.”

Ambiguity
Allows for two or more simultaneous
interpretations of a word, phrase, action,
or situation, all of which can be
supported by the context of a work.
 Deliberate ambiguity can contribute to
the effectiveness and richness of a
work.

Ambiguity
Example: Ghosts or other supernatural
creatures in literary fiction are
sometimes left as an ambiguous
"reality." Is the character hallucinating or
is that supernatural being really there?
Examples can be found in Emily
Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" (1847)
and Henry James's "The Turn of the
Screw."
 Unintentional ambiguity obscures
meaning and can confuse readers.

Paradox

A statement which seems on its face to
be self-contradictory or absurd, yet
turns out to make good sense.

Paradox is useful in poetry because it
arrests a reader’s attention by its
seemingly stubborn refusal to make
sense.
Paradox

Examples:
– “Fair is foul and foul is fair” Shakespeare
– “The child is the father of the man”
Wordsworth
– “My only love sprung from my only hate!”
Shakespeare
– “For when I am weak, then I am strong” St.
Paul

Paradox teases the mind and tests
the limits of language; it can be a
potent device.
Oxymoron

From the Greek meaning “sharp-dull”,
oxymoron is itself an oxymoron.

A self-contradictory combination of
words or smaller verbal units; usually
noun-noun, adjective-adjective, adverbadverb, or adverb-verb.
Oxymoron
If the paradoxical utterance conjoins
two terms that in ordinary usage are
contradictories, it is an oxymoron.
 Example:

“bitter sweet”, “wise fool”,
“loving hate”, “pleasing pains”,
“soft hardness”, “happy sadness”
“jumbo shrimp”, “chiaroscuro”