Irony and Discourses of Modernity: From Romanticism to Postmodernism

This book is a collection of the author's annual departmental lectures at the University of Washington in 1986, aiming to systematically respond to the "metanarrative" of Enlightenment dialectics in German thinker Habermas's "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity" from the same period.
 
Through an exploration of irony and related concepts, the author outlines a summary of the history of Western ideas, reinterpreting irony from a mere rhetorical device into a philosophical construct. In a historical context, the author defines irony as the continuous "self-referentiality" of the present, leading to a series of "ironic discourses of modernity" from Romanticism to postmodernism – "The ironist knows there is no truth; today, the role of philosophy must be played entirely differently."