Divine Madness

On Interpreting Literatures, Music, and the Visual Arts Ironically
Divine Madness provides a theory that enables the concept of irony to be transferred from the literary to the visual and aural domains. Two stories are being told. One is a story of how literary conceptualization has conquered the fields of the other arts and the other is a story of how literary conceptualization, conversely, has been successively relativized. Elleström provides a survey of the historical roots of the concept of irony as well as a discussion of two hermeneutical "options": irony as a mode of oral communication and irony as a mode of literary expression. The author examines how irony is classified and how it is used as an interpretive strategy rather than a "textual trait" intended by an author. Other concepts such as paradox, mysticism and deconstruction are also evaluated in terms of their relation to irony. Elleström concludes by demonstrating that ironic interpretations of not just music are intimately connected to norms, values, and even political stances that tend to be hidden behind an allegedly objective terminology - a terminology that has its roots in the comprehension of irony as an intentional, oral phenomenon.