Per una definizione di ironia architestuale. Una prospettiva semiotica sull’ironia tra verbale e intertestuale

This dissertation develops a theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of a peculiar type of irony—here termed architextual irony—in which a text remains interpretable as ironic even when detached from its original context. In such cases, irony appears to be embedded in the discursive configuration itself, without requiring access to the original communicative situation in order to identify its ironic meaning. These occurrences, which have received little scholarly attention, challenge the widespread assumption that irony is an essentially pragmatic phenomenon dependent on contextual anchoring and speaker intention. The main hypothesis explored in this study is that the contextual function necessary for irony can be fulfilled not only by a concrete situational context, but also by intertextuality, understood not merely as a network of textual relations, but as the set of discursive and textual conventions sedimented within a semiotic community. After offering a critical overview of major theories of irony and distinguishing irony from related phenomena such as humor and deception, the dissertation proposes a model that accounts for both verbal irony and architextual irony as complementary manifestations of a single semiotic strategy. By integrating a De Mauro-inspired approach, Bakhtinian dialogism, Eco’s interpretive semiotics, and Genette’s theory of transtextuality, irony is interpreted as a metapragmatic form closely connected to semantic indeterminacy. In its architextual manifestation, irony exploits the intrinsic polyphony of discursive forms by foregrounding their non-neutral character, activating conventional expectations only to systematically frustrate them. The theoretical proposal is tested through the analysis of selected texts across different semiotic systems, adopting a case-oriented hermeneutic approach focused on what I define as the dominant strategy: the formal project through which a text makes the challenged architextual norm perceptible to its recipient.