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[...] These two literary trends can be seen to represent the two senses in which the term postmodernism is most often employed: on the one hand, a theoretical postmodernism, signifying a predominantly 'academic' problematization and subversion of beliefs considered to be central to modernist though…

According to Judge William, the aesthete laughs the 'laughter of despair' and Kierkegaard speaks of the 'superior indolence that cares for nothing at all, that does not care to work [...], that disperses and exhausts all the powers of the soul in soft enjoyment, and lets consciousness itself evaporate into a loathsome gloaming'.

In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius the critique of the ironic attitude is most evident in the passages concerning Might Magazine. As mentioned in the previous section, the book offers a positive portrayal of the original (however vague) ambitions of the magazine. But soon these ambiti…

It is important to note that irony is a purely negative movement: it destroys what is given, thereby liberating the individual, but it does not contribute anything to the formulation of the new, to the content of the individual's self-becoming. Therefore, the freedom that arises from this break wit…