Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed:
Right after 9/11, the obituaries started to appear: Irony, the reports said, was dead. Either that or in really bad condition.
It had been a very 1990s thing, this irony. Never before in human history had so many people so often used that two-handed gesture to inscribe quotation marks in the air. Or pronounced the word really with an inflection conveying the faux enthusiasm that doubled as transparent contempt (as in; “I really like that new Britney Spears single”). The manner had been forged in earlier times — by pioneers at the Harvard Lampoon, for example. But it really caught on during the cold peace that followed the Cold War. Suddenly, irony became available to everyone, on the cheap. It was the wit of the witless, the familiar smirk beneath the perpetually raised eyebrow.
And then it died. Hard realities broke through the callow veneer of detachment. Everybody became very earnest. And then America entered its present golden age of high seriousness…
More here. And see our own Morgan Meis’s riff on neo-sincerity here.