Saying Otherwise: A Narrative Review of Irony, Parody, and Metalanguage, from Socratic Irony to Postmodern Metafiction
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Irony, parody, and metalanguage are literature's arts of saying otherwise: the irony that means against its words, the parody that repeats in order to differ, the metafiction that writes about its own writing. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of those arts. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the theory of irony, in which Kierkegaard's Socratic concept, Muecke's compass, Booth's stable and unstable infinitudes, Vlastos's complex irony, and de Man's permanent parabasis traced saying-otherwise from dialectic to the general condition of language; the theory of parody, in which Bakhtin's polyphony, Genette's hypertextuality, Hutcheon's repetitions-with-critical-distance, and Rose's ancient-to-postmodern survey fixed the genre's mechanics of quotation and trans-contextualization; and the theory of metalanguage, in which Waugh's metafiction, Hutcheon's postmodern poetics, and Eco's model readers showed the text folding back upon itself as its own subject. It is concluded that the three arts form one continuum of reflexivity---irony within the sentence, parody across texts, metalanguage around the whole---and that their common engine is the reader's double awareness, the critical distance that literature builds into its own speech.
Authors: Revista, Zen, LITERATURE, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204778115