You speak of doubleness, tripleness, and so on, and you immediately ask the question in a historical context by asking what has happened now that irony is again emphasized. That's surely not the case – whether there is now more emphasis or less emphasis on irony, and how you would measure just how much irony. You know, you can't be a “little bit ironic.”

But nevertheless, what you speak of is true in a sense. What you are speaking of is a certain degree of self-consciousness, self-awareness, doubleness, and one always assumes this in any critical enterprise, because it is in the nature of that enterprise to work on something that already comes to you so that you have the impression of knowing more than one who went before and having yourself in a distancing relation to it. So, inherent in the critical act is a self-reflective act, and there is certainly, in irony, a self-reflective moment.

If one looks at it historically, the great moment as far as the theory of irony is concerned would not be contemporary, but would be Romantic irony in Germany in the early nineteenth century. If you want to go to the major texts on irony, you will not find them in contemporary writers. You would have to go back to at least the nineteenth century.