Towards a Definition of Intertextual Irony

The presentation aims to provide a theoretical framework for analysing a distinctive type of irony still underexplored, labelled as ‘intertextual irony’. This phenomenon concerns those cases where a text is inherently ironic regardless of the specific context in which it is situated; thus, its ironic characteristics are embedded within the linguistic form itself. This functioning seems to challenge the main undisputed aspect of irony, namely its crucial pragmatic quality. In fact, it relates to language as a social praxis, inherently shaped by context and the speakers involved. The primary research hypothesis is that the contextual dimension — an absolutely necessary component of irony — can be provided not only by a concrete communicative situation, involving specific interlocutors in a given time and space, but also by intertextuality. This is understood not merely as types of relationship between existing texts, but more profoundly as the set of sedimented linguistic usages and textual structures within a language, which resonate in the utterances speakers produce. Language is never neutral; it carries the echoes of past utterances and the sedimented social practices of a linguistic community. In this sense, intertextuality shapes the background against which utterances are interpreted. The system of linguistic and textual conventions involves implicit assumptions about particular linguistic uses, which irony often foregrounds through contrast. The incongruity at the heart of intertextual irony arises from a contrast between the utterance (or stylistic device) and co-text, frame, linguistic register, genre, textual type, and so on. In this sense, it functions as a strategy that draws on familiar representational forms to establish certain expectations, only to disrupt them through the introduction of an unexpected or inconsistent element. This process of ‘defamiliarisation’ encourages the recipient to reflect on the implicit meanings embedded in language. The presentation outlines the state of the art on intertextual irony, distinguishing it from postmodern irony and from Umberto Eco’s conception. As a premise, it considers current debates on verbal irony, drawing from the post-Gricean framework and Tommaso Russo Cardona’s Austinian approach. The discussion then shifts from “epipragmaticity” to a broader notion of metatextuality, engaging with Bakhtin’s dialogism and Genette’s “trans-textuality.” These perspectives frame the case study on hyphenated phrases in Solomon Silverfish (1987) by David Foster Wallace, where intertextual irony functions as both a critique of genre and a response to the ineffability of trauma.