E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.

The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.

then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today's avant-garde tries to write about? One clue's to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after thirty long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It's not a mode that wears especially well. As Hyde puts it,