From Pirandello's Humor to Eco's Double Coding: Ethics and Irony in Modernist and Postmodernist Italian Fiction

It is often believed that postmodernist irony is associated only with a poetics of relativism and does not carry an ethical message. In this paper I will argue that Vattimo's philosophy of weak thought, and Eco's theory of the postmodernist irony shed new light on the relationship between irony and social commitment, and contradict both the view of postmodernism as divorced from ethics, and the idea that there was a radical break between modernism and postmodernism. Ultimately, I will support the notion of a continuum of irony as a form of ethical commitment from modernism to today.