What are the earliest examples of what we’d recognize as postmodern irony in the wild? (ie not academic theorizing, but in speeches, mainstream fiction, media etc)
I consider wrestling kayfabe to be a good modern representative example
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More examples. Irony really is the hardest sensibility to characterize even though we’re all immersed in it constantly now.
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Most attempts at transcending irony seem to fail in ironic ways. Mostly it’s ineffectively reactionary sincerity in response to cynicism, rather than irony. A response that appears to not actually be sensitive to irony in the first place.
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It’s postcampy. If camp is “failed seriousness” (Susan Sontag) postcamp is failed irony transcendence.
The misreading of cynicism as irony is revealing. There is pure cynicism, and cynicism as a reductive perception of irony. Postcampies cant tell the two apart.
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It's actually right up your alley. I think it is the rise of emergent complex technological systems that we think we created and have god-like agency over, but repeatedly confound our expectations of simple narrative causality.
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I first thought of tall tales, but Wiki led me to the Babin Republic.
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Milo Minderbinder In Catch 22 contracting missions for the Germans, fighting on both sides in the battle of Orvieto and bombing his own squadron at Pianosa
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Some parts of the trystero in the crying lot of 49 by Pynchon and obviously the construction of the V rocket by a British subsidiary of her German parent company during WWII
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