Irony In Martin Amis’s London Fields And Money

Irony, as a rhetoric or philosophical concept, has been diversely comprehended and interpreted. Starting with its most basic definition, and adopting Booth’s methodology of discussing ’stable irony’ in A Rhetoric of Irony, this thesis examines the use of irony in Amis’s London Fields and Money. We shall see that irony, as a rhetorical device, allows the distance between the author and the object of his criticism, yet at the same time making it inevitable that the criticism itself will be saturated in the discourse and context of the target of ironization. Amis is preoccupied with the decay and sordidness of contemporary society. Displaying both the artist’s awareness of his own absorption in these subjects and his evidence of moralism embedded in his excess, the novelist, thanks to the dualism of irony, achieves artistic expression and guides the readers to construct their own moral positions. Through the analysis of irony, we demonstrate that irony is essential to Martin Amis’s art, and our emphasis will be on how an author deals with his thematic preoccupations via this literary mechanism. Accordingly the analysis will be divided into three sections:the morality theme (the apocalypse motif, mass culture, etc.), the sexuality theme (pornography, misogyny, etc.) and the experimentation with the art form.