“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, February 17, 2011

Got Reverse Causation?

My newest Arcade post, concerning apoleptic irony: a term I just invented in a conversation with a very smart undergrad in my Romantics class. It's the opposite of proleptic irony, the irony of anticipation, in which we know something a character in a narrative doesn't know yet. It seems to be the driver of Romantic irony (my favorite sort), and since aesthetics is first philosophy and all that I thought it would be good to start thinking about it. It's also the trope of noir, and thus of dark ecology.

1 comment:

Henry Warwick said...

and then there's apoplectic irony, expressed in the Simpson's "D'OH!!!"