ironist

In short, Maddin is too engaged to be an ironist. He's really a practitioner of fully charged ambivalence, which emerges most strongly in Dracula in his approach toward the title character.

Edmundson posits two prototypes of the exemplary teacher--Plato, the systematic thinker who makes disciples of his pupils and guides them toward indubitable truths, and Socrates, the ironist who offers only questions and the lonely, but exhilarating, possibilities of thinking for oneself.

Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 47-48 n.

Bourne argued, "The ironist is the great intellectual democrat, in whose presence and before whose law all ideas and attitudes stand equa l." Bourne distinguished ironists from the "cynics" that he criticized -- those like H.L.

Those who did take seriously Burckhardt the ironist attributed his pessimism to the influence of Schopenhauer, or saw in it a sort of mal du siecle or, more recently, an adumbration of our own post-modern malaise.

After examining Baudelaire's essay on Constantin Guys, "Le Confiteor de l'artiste," fables of the saltimbanque, and "Les Veuves," she concludes: "The power of the artist is here unequivocally stated and yet, in destabilizing the self-satisfaction of the other, there is also the implicit destabilization of the ironist's position.

Irony, it is claimed, detaches the ironist from society, jades her worldview, and thereby incapacitates her from engaging in meaningful social intercourse.

RICHARD RORTY'S IDEAL CHARACTER, THE "IRONIST," is simultaneously committed to two different projects.

A critical utopia would be characterized by (1) a recognition of the contingency of language and identity; (2) an understanding of attainability as a continuous and evolving process; and (3) incorporation of the perspective of the "ironist." Through his discussion of these particular questions, Rorty provides the tools necessary to understand their relation to utopia.

Political writing at the end of the century is frequently the province of the ironist and the sceptic; the novelist manque the restless journalist who can cruelly illuminate for us the foibles of the great and the powerful.