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#112051 09/14/03 10:00 AM
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I'm going to paste a collection of definitions and examples I gathered off the Web yesterday below for you to read through for comment (or not). One task this year will be for my 100 English 9 students to assimilate about 100 literary terms, some of which will appear on an important standardized test in June. Some of the terms will be specifically addressed in the literature text; others will not. The definitions included in the text often appear to be incomplete to me. And there are no examples, which is a big problem.

I will assign some terms to research teams of students who will put together pages, such as the one I put together yesterday. The students will have opportunities to go online at school and research the terms in the school library along with time to work at home.

What I'd like to know from those of you who care to respond is this:

1. Does the page of information about 'dramatic irony' appear to be adequate so that even poorer readers--with instruction--have a chance of understanding 'dramatic irony'? Keep in mind my own sample page will be a prototypical model for the pages the students put together in their definition teams.

2. In my own brief definition, was I justified in pointing that what the audience knows, 'some' of the characters don't know? Every definition I've come across insists on making a debatable point that the audience knows, but the characters do not. And I can think of instances when the audience knows, some characters do not, but some do know.

I won't take the time to show what I've put in boldface and italics, margins, center spacing and all that jazz; I'll just paste my text.

Thanks to anyone who will respond.

Dramatic Irony

#28 on Literary Terms handout

dramatic irony
noun: (theater) irony that occurs when the meaning of the situation is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play

dramatic irony: The dramatic effect achieved by leading an audience to understand an incongruity between a situation and the accompanying speeches, while the characters in the play remain unaware of the incongruity.

short definition:

dramatic irony = meaning of situation is understood by audience but not by some characters

Examples of dramatic irony:

In Crime and Punishment: The reader also knows that Luzhin puts money in Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladov's pocket when she is not looking.... [Sofya] has no idea that Luzhin has put money into her pocket. Raskolnikov's friend, Andrei Semyonovitch Lebezyatnikov, was present when all of that takes place. "All of this was observed by Andrei Semyonovich." (Dostoyevsky 460) Luzhin goes to a reception for [Sofya's] father, Semyon Zakharovitch Marmeladov, and announces that [Sofya] is a thief. [Sofya] immediately denies the accusation. Luzhin tells her to look in her pocket. Sure enough the money that he was missing was there.... Lebezyatnikov steps in to save the day when he says, "I saw it. I saw it.... And even though it's against my convictions, I would be prepared to swear to it on oath in any court of law you'd care to name, because I saw how you slipped it into her pocket on the sly!" (Dostoyevsky 465)

http://essaycity.com/free_essays/00465.txt Retrieved from the WWW on 9/13/03

"Dramatic Irony occurs when a character says something that the audience knows [to be ironic], but which the character does not. For example, when Oedipus says to his people, "I know / you are sick to death, [from the plague] all of you, / but sick as you are, not one is as sick as I" (162), he means to say that he really feels their pain. But the audience knows that Oedipus is "sick" in another sense--he is polluted with the crimes of patricide and incest. "

http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/Oedipus.htm Retrieved from the WWW on 9/13/03

"As well as this Priestly [the author] chooses to use the more famous example of the sinking of the Titanic which Mr Birling hails as 'unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable.' "

http://www.coursework.info/i/21136.html Retrieved from the WWW on 9/13/03

Any character who would say of the Titanic that it was 'unsinkable' would be used by a contemporary writer for purposes dramatic irony. Why so? Because we all know that the Titanic sank!


#112052 09/14/03 07:53 PM
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I look forward to the other 99 WW. This is very interesting. Sorry I can't comment on this one - I have to admit that our English classes were quite limited.


#112053 09/14/03 10:40 PM
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Can I just check initially I have correctly understood what's going to be presented?

Dramatic Irony

#28 on Literary Terms handout

dramatic irony
noun: (theater) irony that occurs when the meaning of the situation is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play

This is the standard statement you've been provided with?
dramatic irony: The dramatic effect achieved by leading an audience to understand an incongruity between a situation and the accompanying speeches, while the characters in the play remain unaware of the incongruity.

short definition:

dramatic irony = meaning of situation is understood by audience but not by some characters

Examples of dramatic irony: [...]

This is all your own explanation of the term? And will the students be getting both this and the first statement?


#112054 09/15/03 12:11 AM
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This is the standard statement you've been provided with?

This is the statement that appears in numerous dictionaries. It's a bit long for my students, but it will work. I'm going to include all three definitions: the first one you asked about, the second one that I found in several other dictionaries, and the third one that I encapsulated for ease of digestion--and my kids need ease of digestion, especially since they'll be inundated with 100 terms of a wide range of difficulty this year.

The examples, I pulled from the Web. There are probably thousands of examples I could have pulled, but these three I liked because they showed three distinct applications of dramatic irony, but all still related to the definitions.

If you know of better, more telling examples, fantastic. I'd like to have even better ones. I think the Titanic example will ring a bell with the students.

I'd also like to impress upon them that the first two definitions that are found in many dictionaries are somewhat lacking because certain characters could be well aware of situations that many other characters aren't aware of, and that the audience shares the knowledge with these characters. I believe we still have a situation of dramatic irony--as in the case of the Dostoyevsky. My kids may never read Dostoyevsky, but they'll understand the situation of money's having been planted in an innocent's pocket.


#112055 09/15/03 02:05 AM
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Miss, me miss, me, miss, miss! :)

I think you’ve got an excellent and very clear example with your Titanic reference, so I would lead with that one. Personally I doubt the value of the Dostoyevsky example as I suspect many students will find even the strange names a barrier to understanding the point you’re trying to get across; this may be a case where our knowledge of the text could blind us to how a student will receive the information.

Yes, you must be right to suggest the point about only some of the characters being in the dark. I liked your approach including a simplified definition. Guessing you need to cater for quite a range of calibre I’d suggest something like this, incorporating perhaps two levels of definition by means of a recap, and also indicating why the technique might be valuable:


Dramatic Irony

Meaning:
The revelation to an audience of a truth that remains unrecognized by one or more of the characters in a narrative. The contrast between what the audience sees/reads and what the characters know creates an ironic tension.

Purpose:
This tension is often exploited for comic effect but is also used for darker (even tragic) contrasts of truth and falsehood. Like all tension, it assists in capturing our interest to find out how the story gets resolved.

Quick recap:
dramatic irony = situation understood by audience but not by some characters


Example 1: An Inspector Calls ~ Titanic reference (we know Birling’s statement is false, which tends to undermine our trust in any of his other beliefs and statements)

Example 2: King Lear (Act 1, sc iv) ~ when Kent has been banished by the King, he reappears to serve Lear with the words “I do profess to be no less than I seem; to serve him truly that will put me in trust…” Since we in the audience know he is far more than he seems, and yet was not trusted by the King, we see that Lear is blind to true personal worth.
http://larryavisbrown.homestead.com/files/Lear/lear_Id.htm

Example 3: I’d probably take a common example of comedy from contemporary culture (sic) such as a character played by Jim Carey in The Majestic, where we know who he is although his character has lost his memory ~ the tension in this kind of dislocation between what the character knows and what the audience knows feeds a very obviously funny string of occurrences. This humour provides the narrative drive of the story to its conclusion by resolution of the tension.
http://www.all-reviews.com/videos-4/majestic.htm

HTH! Perhaps some better examples will occur to me ~ I'll keep it jogging in mind while building a wall tomorrow :)


#112056 09/16/03 01:44 AM
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Many thanks, Maverick, for your read-through. I like very much your suggestions, especially the way you included both definitions and purpose. My kids will memorize the shortest possible one, so I'm going to attempt to include a very short definition to follow the longer and more detailed ones.

Your Jim Carey reference is very good and I will include that one.

We start the huge haul next week. I'll return with the other four terms I'll introduce next week--but it will have to be the weekend since during the week I have so many papers to grade and grades to enter into the computer system, which is a joy! But that's another topic.

Thanks again for your insightful input.
WW


#112057 09/30/03 12:31 AM
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huge haul

Picturesque turn of phrase, Wordwind.


#112058 10/07/03 04:46 PM
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I don't like the Crime and Punishment example very much. I'm not sure it is dramatic irony per se. We are witnesses to the crime of false witness, basically. The person uttering the lie knows he's lying, and we know he's lying. The fact that his victim doesn't know she's being framed doesn't necessarily make it dramatic irony.

The example from Oedipus Rex is a little complicated for a simple definition of dramatic irony. If I were to use an example from that play (and I would) I would use the speech when Oedipus swears he will catch the man who killed the late king (his father) and bring him to justice.


#112059 10/08/03 01:28 AM
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Yes, I like Oedipus' speech there, too. But I do think the Dostoyevski scene meets the definition if stetched just a bit. The idea is that the audience realizes something that a character is not aware of. That information has been planted by the author into the text so that we will know we are supposed to be aware of something the characters or characters are not aware of.

What makes the Dostoyevski scene a bit tricky is there are characters who know this privileged information, too. However, we still feel the tension that dramatic irony arouses in the audience that has information a character doesn't possess. Dramatic irony causes that kind of restless feeling in which we want to intrude into the scene and tell the character (if it's a sympathetic one) what's going on. Oh, well. It' just my opinion, but there you go.

We covered situational irony today. I had searched for some examples over the Internet, and came across a very simple illustration of situation irony. I've forgotten the site. But here's the situation in a nutshell:

The situation involves your going to a fire station. Everything's spotless and ready to go. Those fire fighters are ready to go. Perfecto! Till you spot the substandard fire alarm--one that clearly is not up to the fire code. An easy definition--if not a very sophisticated one--is: The incongruity in a situation between what should be and what is.

I like that fire station example of situational irony because it's easy to remember. And it was an equally easy segue into our lesson today on "The Most Dangerous Game" where the central character, Rainsford, is offered the most lavish of hospitality on a Caribbean island only to realize that his generous host means to hunt him down and murder him: incongruity between the hospitality of the host and the final gesture of murdering the guest for sport.

I think situational irony and dramatic irony will be fairly easy concepts for my students to grasp once they've collected enough distinct examples of the two.


#112060 10/08/03 05:58 PM
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I love "The Most Dangerous Game"! I just realized that another famous short story that we read in school, "Lamb To the Slaughter," is probably good for some examples of irony.



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