Suck meets the anti-ironist

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Thu Sep 23 12:38:12 PDT 1999


I have the article around the house somewhere but cannot lay my hands on

it for now. The article (if I remember correctly) was entitled, "The Little Red Discount House" and appeared in *Hudson Review* in (I think) the early '60s. The author (again, vague memory) was Benjamin Mott (or DeMott). It was a critique of various "schools of irony" that stemmed from the work of Kenneth Burke as well as of the "college novels" which stemmed from that tradition. He quoted a long passage from some work of literary

criticism which quoted two passages, one from Dickens (the death of little Nell) and one from Engels (*Working Class in England) on the death of a worker's child. The critic treated the Engels ironically -- i.e. saw in it the same sentimentality which he saw in Dickens. Mott (DeMott?) commented that there was, after all, some difference between a scene in a novel and the reporting of what the writer had seen happen to actual people.

Carrol



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