Postmodern irony is not distinctive because parody pervades the Modernists too

Evidence

The thought is presumably the traditional liberal one that any attempt at total social change will lead straight to the Gulag. One consideration behind the frequent claims’made for Postmodern ‘wit’ and ‘irony’ seems to be that the collapse of belief in the possibility or desirability of global political transformation leaves us with nothing better to do than playfully to parody what we can no longer take seriously. Parody is, however, so pervasively present in the great Modernists — Eliot and Joyce, for example — that any attempt to claim it exclusively for Postmodernism just seems implausible; indeed in chapter 2 we shall consider Franco Moretti’s claim that irony is a constitutive feature of Modernism. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 115

Categorization

• SEED: Could feed an essay arguing the irony/pastiche distinction dissolves once one reads Eliot and Joyce as already parodic.