78-473: The Herman Cain Award is an ironic award given to people who expressed hesitancy toward COVID-19 vaccines or face masks, who later died from COVID-19 or its complications. The award is named after American businessman and political figure Herman Cain , a Republican politician who died of COVID-19 complications after attending a 2020 Trump Tulsa rally in support of then-President Donald Trump without wearing
156-523: A face mask . Cain had publicly tweeted the disease was not deadly and discouraged people from taking it seriously. A text label which says "Awarded" is emblazoned on the conversation thread containing evidence and community discussions of a third party's anti-COVID mitigation positions and their subsequent death. The concept is associated with the subreddit r/HermanCainAward, where posts about people who have "made public declaration of their anti-mask, anti-vax, or Covid-hoax views" are marked as "nominated" if
234-509: A paywall -based business model in 1998 that attracted up to 20,000 subscribers but was later abandoned. A similar subscription model was implemented in April 2001 by Slate ' s independently owned competitor, Salon.com . Slate started a daily feature, "Today's Pictures", on November 30, 2005, which featured 15–20 photographs from the archive at Magnum Photos that share a common theme. The column also features two animated "Interactive Essays"
312-473: A paywall system called "Slate Plus", offering ad-free podcasts and bonus materials. A year later, it had attracted 9,000 subscribers generating about $ 500,000 in annual revenue. Slate moved all content behind a metered paywall for international readers in June 2015, explaining "our U.S.-based sales team sells primarily to domestic advertisers, many of whom only want to reach a domestic audience. ...The end result
390-457: A psychotherapist writing for NBC News , described the subreddit as "A dark and sardonic corner of the internet" that "captures the rage and outrage of presumably vaccinated, mask-wearing individuals, many of whom have either been infected with Covid-19 in the past or have watched friends and family become ill — and even die." Barth also described "This push to revel in schadenfreude , and to assign collective blame" as "understandable and more than
468-467: A rhetorical device and literary technique . In some philosophical contexts, however, it takes on a larger significance as an entire way of life. Irony has been defined in many different ways, and there is no general agreement about the best way to organize its various types. 'Irony' comes from the Greek eironeia ( εἰρωνεία ) and dates back to the 5th century BCE. This term itself was coined in reference to
546-436: A "wonderful, eternal alternation between enthusiasm and irony", between "creation and destruction", an "eternal oscillation between self-expansion and self-limitation of thought", a "reciprocal play ( Wechselspiel ) between the infinite and the finite", it is "the pulse and alternation between universality and individuality"—no matter how the contrasting pairs may be articulated. In this way, according to Schlegel, irony captures
624-402: A Facebook page of Covid-19 victims. Publication after publication, the pattern invariably repeats itself: one person (anonymized to respect Reddit rules) says all the bad things they think about vaccines, masks, or sometimes even doubts the existence of the pandemic. Often the memes (humorous diversions) used to illustrate mistrust of the vaccine are the same. The following screenshot tells us that
702-421: A little expected, especially on the internet. But this so-called award also captures the collective loss of empathy that colors so many of our political and personal conversations right now. Like soldiers who have been trained to see their enemies as less than human, we have forgotten that those who disagree with us are, despite everything, still people." In an interview with Business Insider , Rocky Moose, one of
780-433: A membership model with a metered paywall . It is known, and sometimes criticized, for having adopted contrarian views, giving rise to the term "Slate Pitches". It has a generally liberal editorial stance. Slate features regular and semi-regular columns such as Explainer, Moneybox, Spectator, Transport , and Dear Prudence . Many of the articles are short (less than 2,000 words) and argument-driven. Around 2010,
858-459: A month. On its 10th anniversary, Slate unveiled a redesigned website. It introduced Slate V in 2007, an online video magazine with content that relates to or expands upon their written articles. In 2013, the magazine was redesigned under the guidance of design director Vivian Selbo . Slate was nominated for four digital National Magazine Awards in 2011 and won the NMA for General Excellence. In
SECTION 10
#1732930294059936-431: A rhetorical perspective means to consider it as an act of communication. In A Rhetoric of Irony , Wayne C. Booth seeks to answer the question of "how we manage to share ironies and why we so often do not". Because irony involves expressing something in a way contrary to literal meaning, it always involves a kind of "translation" on the part of the audience. Booth identifies three principal kinds of agreement upon which
1014-752: A rhetorically complex phenomenon. Admired by some and feared by others, it has the power to tighten social bonds, but also to exacerbate divisions. How best to organize irony into distinct types is almost as controversial as how best to define it. There have been many proposals, generally relying on the same cluster of types; still, there is little agreement as to how to organize the types and what if any hierarchical arrangements might exist. Nevertheless, academic reference volumes standardly include at least all four of verbal irony , dramatic irony , cosmic irony , and Romantic irony as major types. The latter three types are sometimes contrasted with verbal irony as forms of situational irony , that is, irony in which there
1092-451: A stock-character from Old Comedy (such as that of Aristophanes ) known as the eiron , who dissimulates and affects less intelligence than he has—and so ultimately triumphs over his opposite, the alazon , a vain-glorious braggart. Although initially synonymous with lying, in Plato 's dialogues eironeia came to acquire a new sense of "an intended simulation which the audience or hearer
1170-411: A universal truth about the human situation. Even Booth, whose interest is expressly rhetorical, notes that the word "irony" tends to attach to "a type of character — Aristophanes' foxy eirons , Plato's disconcerting Socrates — rather than to any one device". In these contexts, what is expressed rhetorically by cosmic irony is ascribed existential or metaphysical significance. As Muecke puts it, such irony
1248-465: A variety of pseudonyms. Scholar K. Brian Söderquist argues that these fictive authors should be viewed as explorations of the existential challenges posed by such an ironic, poetic self-consciousness. Their awareness of their own unlimited powers of self-interpretation prevents them from fully committing to any single self-narrative, and this leaves them trapped in an entirely negative mode of uncertainty. Nevertheless, seemingly against this, Thesis XV of
1326-513: A website that tracks usage of Reddit. When asked about the subreddit by The Washington Post , Herman Cain's daughter Melanie Cain Gallo responded in an email stating: "I had not heard about this, and it has no effect on our family because that group is insignificant and irrelevant." The Independent compared r/HermanCainAward to the Darwin Awards . The subreddit has inspired a Twitter account of
1404-462: A writer is a romantic ironist if and when his or her work commits itself enthusiastically both in content and form to a hovering or unresolved debate between a world of merely man-made being and a world of ontological becoming. Similarly, metafiction is: "Fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions (esp. naturalism) and narrative techniques." It
1482-399: Is absolute because Socrates refuses to cheat. In this way, contrary to traditional accounts, Kierkegaard portrays Socrates as genuinely ignorant. According to Kierkegaard, Socrates is the embodiment of an ironic negativity that dismantles others' illusory knowledge without offering any positive replacement. Almost all of Kierkegaard's post-dissertation publications were written under
1560-504: Is "total" in its denunciation of a figure actually intended to preserve "our openness to a systematic philosophy". Yet, it is Hegel's interpretation that would be taken up and amplified by Kierkegaard , who further extends the critique to Socrates himself. Thesis VIII of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard's dissertation, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates , states that "irony as infinite and absolute negativity
1638-460: Is Socrates, who " knew that he knew nothing ", yet never ceased in his pursuit of truth and virtue. According to Schlegel, instead of resting upon a single foundation, "the individual parts of a successful synthesis formation support and negate each other reciprocally". Although Schlegel frequently does describe the Romantic project with a literary vocabulary, his use of the term "poetry" ( Poesie )
SECTION 20
#17329302940591716-497: Is a dual distinction between and among three grades and four modes of ironic utterance. Grades of irony are distinguished "according to the degree to which the real meaning is concealed". Muecke names them overt , covert , and private : Muecke's typology of modes are distinguished "according to the kind of relationship between the ironist and the irony". He calls these impersonal irony , self-disparaging irony , ingénue irony , and dramatized irony : To consider irony from
1794-408: Is a play within a play set in a lunatic asylum, in which it is difficult to tell whether the players are speaking only to other players or also directly to the audience. When The Herald says, "The regrettable incident you've just seen was unavoidable indeed foreseen by our playwright", there is confusion as to who is being addressed, the "audience" on the stage or the audience in the theatre. Also, since
1872-454: Is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, thereby exposing the fictional illusion. Gesa Giesing writes that "the most common form of metafiction is particularly frequent in Romantic literature. The phenomenon is then referred to as Romantic Irony." Giesing notes that "There has obviously been an increased interest in metafiction again after World War II." For example, Patricia Waugh quotes from several works at
1950-641: Is a villain, people who take COVID vaccines are like laboratory rats in an experiment, people who support political liberalism are like sheep, immigrants spread disease much more than citizens, and vaccine mandates are comparable to the Nazi treatment of the Jewish people in the Holocaust . Slate also says award winners compare themselves to lions who are proud and free, or share tips on arguing with waiting staff at restaurants that require guests to wear masks. According to
2028-493: Is also given metaphysical significance in the work of Søren Kierkegaard , among other philosophers. Romantic irony is closely related to cosmic irony, and sometimes the two terms are treated interchangeably. Romantic irony is distinct, however, in that it is the author who assumes the role of the cosmic force. The narrator in Tristam Shandy is one early example. The term is closely associated with Friedrich Schlegel and
2106-578: Is an online magazine that covers current affairs, politics, and culture in the United States. It was created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley , initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN . In 2004, it was purchased by The Washington Post Company (later renamed the Graham Holdings Company), and since 2008 has been managed by The Slate Group , an online publishing entity created by Graham Holdings. Slate
2184-618: Is based in New York City, with an additional office in Washington, D.C. Slate , which is updated throughout the day, covers politics, arts and culture, sports, and news. According to its former editor-in-chief Julia Turner , the magazine is "not fundamentally a breaking news source", but rather aimed at helping readers to "analyze and understand and interpret the world" with witty and entertaining writing. As of mid-2015, it publishes about 1,500 stories per month. A French version, slate.fr ,
2262-409: Is both a philosophical conception of the universe and an artistic program. Ontologically, it sees the world as fundamentally chaotic. No order, no far goal of time, ordained by God or right reason, determines the progression of human or natural events […] Of course, romantic irony itself has more than one mode. The style of romantic irony varies from writer to writer […] But however distinctive the voice,
2340-403: Is its highest form, but in no way its only form. Irony is not the only literary term to which Schlegel assigns extra-literary significance. Indeed, irony itself is presented as the uneasy synthesis of allegory and wit . Summarized by scholar Manfred Frank : "As allegory, the individual exceeds itself in the direction of the infinite, while as wit the infinite allows the unity that breaks from
2418-449: Is no ironist; so, instead of " he is being ironical " we would instead say " it is ironical that ". Verbal irony is "a statement in which the meaning that a speaker employs is sharply different from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed". Moreover, it is produced intentionally by the speaker, rather than being a literary construct, for instance, or the result of forces outside of their control. Samuel Johnson gives as an example
Herman Cain Award - Misplaced Pages Continue
2496-405: Is non-standard. Instead, he goes back to the broader sense of the original Greek poiētikós , which refers to any kind of making. As Beiser puts it, "Schlegel intentionally explodes the narrow literary meaning of Poesie by explicitly identifying the poetic with the creative power in human beings, and indeed with the productive principle in nature itself." Poetry in the restricted literary sense
2574-471: Is not a mere "artistic playfulness", but a "conscious form of literary creation", typically involving the "consistent alternation of affirmation and negation". No longer just a rhetorical device, on their conception, it refers to an entire metaphysical stance on the world. It is commonplace to begin a study of irony with the acknowledgement that the term quite simply eludes any single definition. Philosopher Richard J. Bernstein opens his Ironic Life with
2652-465: Is not as deadly as the mainstream media first made it out to be", which was met with considerable mockery online. Cain's name "became synonymous with the grandstanding hubris of the MAGA movement", given the apparent irony of Cain's account downplaying a disease that had killed him. According to Business Insider , the subreddit "was originally focused on people who were against wearing masks or didn't believe
2730-425: Is one's pride. Nevertheless, even as it excludes its victims, irony also has the power to build and strengthen the community of those who do understand and appreciate. Typically "irony" is used, as described above, with respect to some specific act or situation. In more philosophical contexts, however, the term is sometimes assigned a more general significance, in which it is used to describe an entire way of life or
2808-585: Is seen by many others as dehumanising anti-vaxxers/maskers as they too grieve the loss of their loved ones who died from not masking up or getting jabbed." Lydia Dugdale, director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center , said that it is "not surprising that people would delight on the misfortune of others" but that "Delighting in the suffering of others lies contrary to everything medical ethics espouses and certainly it's cruel that regular people would do this." F. Diane Barth,
2886-553: Is that of "life itself or any general aspect of life seen as fundamentally and inescapably an ironic state of affairs. No longer is it a case of isolated victims.... we are all victims of impossible situations". This usage has its origins primarily in the work of Friedrich Schlegel and other early 19th-century German Romantics and in Søren Kierkegaard 's analysis of Socrates in The Concept of Irony . Friedrich Schlegel
2964-479: Is that, outside the United States, we are not covering our costs." At the same time, it was stated that there were no plans for a domestic paywall. Since 2006, Slate has been known for publishing contrarian pieces arguing against commonly held views about a subject, giving rise to the #slatepitches Twitter hashtag in 2009. The Columbia Journalism Review has defined Slate pitches as "an idea that sounds wrong or counterintuitive proposed as though it were
3042-494: Is the lightest and the weakest form of subjectivity". Although this terminology is Hegelian in origin, Kierkegaard employs it with a somewhat different meaning. Richard J. Bernstein elaborates: It is infinite because it is directed not against this or that particular existing entity, but against the entire given actuality at a certain time. It is thoroughly negative because it is incapable of offering any positive alternative. Nothing positive emerges out of this negativity. And it
3120-406: The contrary of which is known by observers (especially the audience, sometimes to other characters within the drama) to be true. Tragic irony is a specific type of dramatic irony. Cosmic irony , sometimes also called "the irony of fate", presents agents as always ultimately thwarted by forces beyond human control. It is strongly associated with the works of Thomas Hardy . This form of irony
3198-465: The early German Romantics , and in their hands it assumed a metaphysical significance similar to cosmic irony in the hands of Kierkegaard. It was also of central importance to the literary theory advanced by New Criticism in mid-20th century. Building upon the double-level structure of irony, self-described "ironologist" D. C. Muecke proposes another, complementary way in which we may typify, and so better understand, ironic phenomena. What he proposes
Herman Cain Award - Misplaced Pages Continue
3276-556: The 1st century CE. "Irony" entered the English language as a figure of speech in the 16th century with a meaning similar to the French ironie , itself derived from the Latin. Around the end of the 18th century, "irony" takes on another sense, primarily credited to Friedrich Schlegel and other participants in what came to be known as early German Romanticism . They advance a concept of irony that
3354-429: The deadly virus was dangerous" and that "Early posts created by founder and moderator FBAHobo were about politicians like Nashville Metro Council member Tony Tenpenny and Arkansas GOP county chair Steven Farmer, who both died from COVID complications." According to Le Monde , "In its early days, HCA was primarily fueled by articles found in the press", but that "in recent months, the examples have been drawn directly from
3432-559: The dilemma irony is introduced to resolve. Already in Schlegel's own day, G. W. F. Hegel was unfavorably contrasting Romantic irony with that of Socrates. On Hegel's reading, Socratic irony partially anticipates his own dialectical approach to philosophy. Romantic irony, by contrast, Hegel alleges to be fundamentally trivializing and opposed to all seriousness about what is of substantial interest. According to Rüdiger Bubner , however, Hegel's "misunderstanding" of Schlegel's concept of irony
3510-399: The dissertation states that "Just as philosophy begins with doubt, so also a life that may be called human begins with irony". Bernstein writes that the emphasis here must be on begins . Irony is not itself an authentic mode of life, but it is a precondition for attaining such a life. Although pure irony is self-destructive, it generates a space in which it becomes possible to reengage with
3588-501: The first months of the COVID-19 pandemic . In June 2020, he attended a Trump rally in Tulsa where many participants did not engage in social distancing or mask wearing. Cain tested positive for COVID nine days later and was hospitalized, before eventually dying of the disease on July 30. One month after his death, his Twitter account stated, in a since-deleted tweet, that "It looks like the virus
3666-400: The fragmentary finitude of which contradicts the intended infinite content. Schlegel presents irony as the "structural whole" sought by these two "abstract" figures. It accomplishes this by "surpassing of all self-imposed limits". Frank cites Schlegel's descriptions from a variety of sources: Irony consists in a "constant alternation ( Wechsel ) between self-creation and self-destruction", in
3744-515: The full name and faces of all individuals included in any social media screencaps, unless the individual in question was a public figure. Many award recipients are unnamed individuals whose likeness has been obscured. The community of reviewers comes to learn of the "awardee" through screenshots of their social media posts about COVID. Award recipients often post the same sorts of memes and statements. According to online magazine Slate , common talking points among award winners are that Anthony Fauci
3822-444: The group behind the award "insignificant and irrelevant." It looks like the virus is not as deadly as the mainstream media first made it out to be. Replying to @THEHermanCain Sir, the virus killed you. You died from it. Herman Cain , a prominent Republican businessman and former presidential candidate , publicly denied the severity of COVID-19 and spread COVID-19 misinformation during
3900-427: The human situation of always striving towards, but never completely possessing, what is infinite or true. This presentation of Schlegel's account of irony is at odds with many 20th-century interpretations, which, neglecting the larger historical context, have been predominately postmodern . These readings overstate the irrational dimension of early Romantic thought at the expense of its rational commitments—precisely
3978-430: The magazine also began running long-form journalism. Many of the longer stories are an outgrowth of the "Fresca Fellowships", so-called because former editor Plotz liked the soft drink Fresca . "The idea is that every writer and editor on staff has to spend a month or six weeks a year not doing their regular job, but instead working on a long, ambitious project of some sort", Plotz said in an interview. Slate introduced
SECTION 50
#17329302940594056-418: The mind; accuses other men not only of wrong beliefs but of being wrong at their very foundations and blind to what these foundations imply[.] This is why, when we misunderstand an intended ironic utterance, we often feel more embarrassed about our failure to recognize the incongruity than we typically do when we simply misunderstand a statement of fact. When one's deepest beliefs are at issue, so too, often,
4134-618: The moderators, by October 2021, 2,393 people had been nominated for the award, 2,515 people had received the award, and 71 people had received IPAs. Subscriptions to the subreddit grew from 2,000 on July 4, 2021, to 5,000 in early August, to more than 100,000 on September 1, to 243,000 on September 17, to 276,000 on September 21, to 339,000 on September 29, to more than 350,000 on October 7, to more than 375,000 on October 16, and to about 438,000 on December 23 to more than 504,000 on May 30 2022. By October 2021, r/HermanCainAward received nearly one million unique daily visitors. WebMD has described
4212-421: The most popular. This count had shrunk to 14 by February 2015, with all receiving six million downloads per month. The podcasts are "a profitable part of [ Slate' s] business"; the magazine charges more for advertising in its podcasts than in any of its other content. Slate podcasts have gotten longer over the years. The original Gabfest ran 15 minutes; by 2012, most ran about 45 minutes. Michael Kinsley
4290-525: The observation that a survey of the literature on irony leaves the reader with the " dominant impression" that the authors are simply "talking about different subjects". Indeed, Geoffrey Nunberg , a lexical semantician , observes a trend of sarcasm replacing the linguistic role of verbal irony as a result of all this confusion. In the 1906 The King's English , Henry Watson Fowler writes, "any definition of irony—though hundreds might be given, and very few of them would be accepted—must include this, that
4368-459: The person has just fallen ill, and sometimes that the illness does not really give them a break. Calls to pray for help may follow, before a loved one finally announces the death." On September 7, 2021, a member of r/HermanCainAward alleged that other members of the subreddit were doxing and harassing family members of recently deceased COVID-19 patients. Later that month, moderators of the subreddit put in place new rules requiring all posts to redact
4446-457: The person is hospitalized with COVID-19. If the person dies, the post is marked "awarded". The subreddit also flags users who show pictures of their COVID-19 vaccination cards as "Immunized to Prevent Award" (IPA). The concept of the award is controversial, with some arguing its merits to be justified and others criticizing it. Responses to the award are varied, including allegations that it contrasts common medical ethics . Cain's daughter called
4524-584: The play within the play is performed by the inmates of a lunatic asylum, the theatre audience cannot tell whether the paranoia displayed before them is that of the players, or the people they are portraying. Muecke notes that, "in America, Romantic irony has had a bad press", while "in England...[it] is almost unknown." In a book entitled English Romantic Irony , Anne Mellor writes, referring to Byron , Keats , Carlyle , Coleridge , and Lewis Carroll : Romantic irony
4602-489: The same name. On September 27, 2021, a Reddit spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement that they were "closely reviewing the COVID-related communities on our platforms for violations of our policies, including r/HermanCainAward." Irony Irony , in its broadest sense, is the juxtaposition of what appears to be the case on the surface and what is actually the case or to be expected. It typically figures as
4680-567: The same year, the magazine laid off several high-profile journalists, including co-founder Jack Shafer and Timothy Noah (author of the Chatterbox column). At the time, it had around 40 full-time editorial staff. The following year, a dedicated ad sales team was created. Slate launched the "Slate Book Review" in 2012, a monthly books section edited by Dan Kois. The next year, Slate became profitable after preceding years had seen layoffs and falling ad revenues. In 2014, Slate introduced
4758-720: The sentence, " Bolingbroke was a holy man" (he was anything but). Verbal irony is sometimes also considered to encompass various other literary devices such as hyperbole and its opposite, litotes , conscious naïveté, and others. Dramatic irony provides the audience with information of which characters are unaware, thereby placing the audience in a position of advantage to recognize their words and actions as counter-productive or opposed to what their situation actually requires. Three stages may be distinguished — installation, exploitation, and resolution (often also called preparation, suspension, and resolution) — producing dramatic conflict in what one character relies or appears to rely upon,
SECTION 60
#17329302940594836-417: The site since he started writing for it 15 years previously. He suggested that its original worldview, influenced by its founder Kinsley and described by Engber as "feisty, surprising, debate-club centrist-by-default" and "liberal contrarianism", had shifted towards "a more reliable, left-wing slant", whilst still giving space for heterodox opinions, albeit "tempered by other, graver duties". He argued that this
4914-411: The site's journalism. "We are not looking to argue that up is down and black is white for the sake of being contrarian against all logic or intellectual rigor. But journalism is more interesting when it surprises you either with the conclusions that it reaches or the ways that it reaches them." In a 2019 article for the site, Slate contributor Daniel Engber reflected on the changes that had occurred on
4992-431: The story, enjoying the kind of 'suspension of disbelief' required of realist novels...what follows is a remarkable act of metafictional 'frame-breaking ' ". As evidence, chapter 13 "notoriously" begins: "I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. […] if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense". Slate (magazine) Slate
5070-528: The subreddit as turning "death notices from public announcements into a cudgel for public shaming of sorts." According to Gita Jackson of Vice , "Although the Herman Cain Award wasn't created to encourage people to get vaccinated, it's helping anti-vaxxers change their minds." According to Deccan Herald , the subreddit "has been at the centre of debates and discussions on ethics and morality, with many calling for Reddit to take it down" and that "The award
5148-459: The subreddit's moderators, said that the subreddit was "an emotional outlet born out of frustration" and that "COVID misinformation kills. We're documenting a pandemic of the unvaccinated". On October 16, 2021, CNBC reported that the subreddit had convinced some readers to get vaccinated against COVID-19 . CNBC also reported that r/HermanCainAward was the tenth fastest growing subreddit over the previous thirty days, according to FrontPageMetrics.com,
5226-665: The successful translation of irony depends: common mastery of language, shared cultural values, and (for artistic ironies) a common experience of genre. A consequence of this element of in-group membership is that there is more at stake in whether one grasps an ironic utterance than there is in whether one grasps an utterance presented straight. As he puts it, the use of irony is An aggressively intellectual exercise that fuses fact and value, requiring us to construct alternative hierarchies and choose among them; [it] demands that we look down on other men's follies or sins; floods us with emotion-charged value judgments which claim to be backed by
5304-595: The surface meaning and the underlying meaning of what is said are not the same." A consequence of this, he observes, is that an analysis of irony requires the concept of a double audience "consisting of one party that hearing shall hear & shall not understand, & another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware both of that more & of the outsiders' incomprehension". From this basic feature, literary theorist Douglas C. Muecke identifies three basic characteristics of all irony: According to Wayne Booth , this uneven double-character of irony makes it
5382-399: The tightest logic ever", and in explaining its success wrote "Readers want to click on Slate Pitches because they want to know what a writer could possibly say that would support their logic". In 2014, Slate ' s then editor-in-chief Julia Turner acknowledged a reputation for counterintuitive arguments forms part of Slate 's "distinctive" brand, but argued that the hashtag misrepresents
5460-454: The top of her chapter headed "What is metafiction?". These include: The thing is this. That of all the several ways of beginning a book […] I am confident my own way of doing it is best Since I've started this story, I've gotten boils […] Additionally, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction says of John Fowles 's The French Lieutenant's Woman , "For the first twelve chapters...the reader has been able to immerse him or herself in
5538-503: The wholeness of the series to appear selectively." According to Schlegel, allegory points beyond itself toward that which can be expressed only poetically, not directly. He describes wit as a "selective flashing" ( Aufblitzen ); its content, he says, is "always paradoxical", its unifications of the finite and the infinite are always fragmentary. These two figures cannot exist together at once. What allegory attains indirectly by conjoining, wit attains only momentarily by total individuation,
5616-540: The world in a genuine mode of ethical passion . For Kierkegaard himself, this took the form of religious inwardness. What is crucial, however, is just to in some way move beyond the purely (or merely) ironic. Irony is what creates the space in which we can learn and meaningfully choose how to live a life worthy ( vita digna ) of being called human. Referring to earlier self-conscious works such as Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy , D. C. Muecke points particularly to Peter Weiss 's 1964 play, Marat/Sade . This work
5694-521: Was Slate ' s founder and was its first editor, from 1996 until 2002. Jacob Weisberg was Slate ' s editor from 2002 until 2008. Weisberg's deputy editor David Plotz then became editor until July 2014, when he was replaced by Julia Turner . Turner resigned as editor of Slate in October 2018. Jared Hohlt became editor-in-chief on April 1, 2019. He stepped down in January 2022. Hillary Frey
5772-405: Was at the forefront of the intellectual movement that has come to be known as Frühromantik , or early German Romanticism, situated narrowly between 1797 and 1801. For Schlegel, the "romantic imperative" (a rejoinder to Immanuel Kant 's " categorical imperative ") is to break down the distinction between art and life with the creation of a "new mythology" for the modern age. In particular, Schlegel
5850-478: Was launched in February 2009 by a group of four journalists, including Jean-Marie Colombani , Eric Leser, and economist Jacques Attali . Among them, the founders hold 50 percent in the publishing company, while The Slate Group holds 15 percent. In 2011, slate.fr started a separate site covering African news, Slate Afrique , with a Paris-based editorial staff. As of 2021, the magazine is both ad-supported and has
5928-465: Was meant to recognise". More simply put, it came to acquire the general definition, "the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect". Until the Renaissance , the Latin ironia was considered a part of rhetoric, usually a species of allegory , along the lines established by Cicero and Quintilian near the beginning of
6006-566: Was necessary within the context of a "Manichean age of flagrant cruelty and corruption", although he also acknowledged that it could be "a troubling limitation". According to NiemanLab, Slate has been involved in podcasts "almost from the very beginning" of the medium. Its first podcast offering, released on July 15, 2005, featured selected stories from the site read by Andy Bowers, who had joined Slate after leaving NPR in 2003. By June 2012, Slate had expanded their lineup to 19 podcasts, with Political Gabfest and Culture Gabfest being
6084-475: Was responding to what he took to be the failure of the foundationalist enterprise, exemplified for him by the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte . Irony is a response to the apparent epistemic uncertainties of anti-foundationalism. In the words of scholar Frederick C. Beiser , Schlegel presents irony as consisting in "the recognition that, even though we cannot attain truth, we still must forever strive toward it, because only then do we approach it." His model
#58941