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ABSTRACT: In this paper, I attempt to develop a working sociological understanding of irony. I examine previous scholarly attempts to understand the ironic and then situate my understanding within the framework of cultural sociology, using previous work on narrative forms in philosophy, literary theory, and the social sciences to examine how irony might be understood as a narrative that takes different shapes depending on social stakes. Rather than a simply linear notion of irony, though, I use Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnival to put irony within a two-dimensional map, creating a map of irony. I then demonstrate how this map might work by comparing a 2006 episode of The Office with a 1992 episode of Seinfeld along with segments from both the early and late versions of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stephen Vaisey's dual process theory provides an important service to sociological theories of action, particularly those that concern themselves with how and when culture acts. I am suggesting that a revised version of his theory can resolve the tension between sociologists like Ann Swidler--who emphasize cultural action in discrete moments--and sociologists like Jeffrey Alexander--who emphasize cultural action over continuous time. While Vaisey's image of a "rider on an elephant" is certainly useful, I think sociologists might be better served by an earlier version of the "dual process theory", that of George Herbert Mead. Also, just as Vaisey incorporates recent development in cognitive psychology to enrich our sociological conversation, I pull from the Aristotelian "virtue ethics" of moral philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre and John Dewey, suggesting that that their admittedly different projects can be synthesized in a way that complement's Mead conception of the 'me' and the 'I'. Lastly, I show how this revised theory of culture in action can augment sociological theories of practice by applying it to three recent ethnographies: Karin Knorr Cetina's Epistemic Cultures, Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods, and Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]