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Flannery O’Connor: Isn’t it Ironic? 1774 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.
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.
Full Transcript
- 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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