In 1993, David Foster Wallace published an essay, titled “E Unibus Pluram,” in which he attempted to diagnose what he saw as the malaise of modern American culture. In the essay, Wallace describes ...

Taking its name from the Greek eironeia (dissimulation), irony consists of purporting a meaning of an utterance or a situation that is different, often opposite, to the literal one. Maike Oergel, ...

See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. So when did it hit you that the 20th century might be maxed out on ...

Whatever happened to irony? Not sarcasm, not snark. Jonathan Lear on why we need real irony, now. (Jesse Costa/WBUR) When the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001, a prominent American essayist ...

Irony is one of those things you kind of know when you see or hear it on screen, but it's much harder to define and put into layman's terms. But don't worry, we have you covered there. Today, we're ...

We don't always recognize irony right away. An interdisciplinary research team at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main found that irony is primarily signaled by ...

Well, isn’t this ironic? Just when we need an ironic sensibility to remain cleareyed in dangerous times, we’re told irony is obsolete. And this from some people who’ve made it their business to peddle ...

Two-hundred-something years ago, after the earnestly murderous trials of the French Revolution, irony appeared on the cobblestoned streets of Paris. Young aristocratic men called Incroyables took to ...