If you are to really encounter a human otherness which finds an answering chorus in yourself, which can become an answering chorus to your own sense of inward isolation, there truly is no authentic place to turn except to a book. You talk in the book about contemporary readers having difficulty comprehending irony in literature of earlier times. Irony by definition is the saying of one thing while meaning another, sometimes indeed quite the opposite of what overtly you are saying. It's very difficult to have the highest kind of imaginative literature from Homer through Don DeLillo, as it were, and entirely avoid irony. It's very difficult to convey this quality of irony by purely visual means.
Visual ironies tend to fall flat or they vulgarize very quickly or they become grotesque.
Really subtle irony of any sort demands literary language. The way in which meaning tends to wander in any really interesting literary text, so that the reader is challenged to go into exile with it, catch up with it, learn how to construe it, make it her very own, is essentially a function of irony. I suppose for politicians' speeches and perhaps for certain representatives of popular religion, but will leave us badly defrauded. The primary answer has to be Shakespeare. Even if I did not teach Shakespeare all the time, I would always be re-reading Shakespeare, reciting Shakespeare to myself, brooding about the great plays.