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Flannery O’Connor: Isn’t it Ironic? 1771 Views


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Description:

We had a hilariously ironic description of this video written and ready to publish, but then our dog ate it. So you get this one instead.

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:03

Flannery O’Connor: Isn’t it Ironic? a la Shmoop

00:08

Many people are lacking a certain, critical nutrient.

00:10

No, it isn’t calcium. Okay, yeah… protein’s good, too.

00:15

But we’re actually referring to… a healthy sense of irony.

00:19

Let’s see you pick up a bottle of that stuff at your local GNC.

00:24

Some try to make up for it with snarkiness…

00:27

…but snarkiness is to irony what aspartame is to sugar.

00:32

Satisfying at first, but it leaves a bad aftertaste… and might cause medical issues.

00:37

What we really need is 100%, grade-A irony.

00:41

Flannery O’Connor’s stories are chock full of the stuff.

00:44

Irony is ingestible in a variety of different ways… don’t worry, none of them are used

00:48

as suppositories.

00:49

First, we have verbal irony, where words mean the opposite of what they say.

00:55

Like the phrase… a good man is hard to find.

00:58

What exactly is a good man, anyway? And what if the people saying it aren’t even good

01:03

themselves? Then there’s situational irony, when what

01:07

happens is the opposite of what we expect. Flannery O’Connor’s work is a great source

01:14

of dramatic irony, when the audience knows something the characters don’t.

01:19

In fact, in today’s sound bite age, sometimes it feels like we’ve forgotten what irony

01:26

is…

01:27

We’re looking at you, Alanis.

01:28

Some people today say we’re in an age of new irony.

01:31

You might even call it the… Iron-y Age.

01:36

But Flannery O’Connor wouldn’t recognize this so-called irony as the real thing.

01:40

Although we’d love to hear what she’d have to say about Toddlers and Tiaras.

01:44

She’d probably say that we now live in an age of snark: snide remarks that are cutting

01:49

and malicious…

01:50

…but don’t dig in deep to the essential nature of the world, as irony does.

01:55

So what age do we live in?

01:57

An age of new irony?

01:58

An age of snark?

02:00

The age of Aquarius? Shmoop amongst yourselves.

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