Lee Konstantinou Stuff I write.

O Blog!

I have been thinking a lot lately about the status of this blog in relation to my academic work. When I began this blog, I had the idea that it would be a nice way for me to formalize my note-taking process and create a space within which I could test out ideas before committing them to paper and to the process of peer-review. Lately, however, I have begun to wonder if blogs, as one of many public fora, might work against my professional development. Could something that I write here in this blog, even if it is cast as only tentative, cause problems for me in the future? Might someone I inadvertantly criticize or discuss someday be on a job committee that would consider whether or not to hire me? Could what I take to be an offhand or lighthearted comment get contrued as damning evidence of my stupidity or incompetance? These are risks we all take every day, just by having conversations with people, but the problem with blogging is that there is a public record of things that I have written, warts and all. Perhaps the only problem is my writing about academic matters--if I stick to my personal life, then perhaps the boundaries between personal blogging and professional argumentation would be more clear. At the same time, I feel like my professional identity will always involve a very strong component of public writing--writing for a public and also writing in venues that are not peer-reviewed. What is one to do? I am open to all ideas. My feeling, for now, is that I am going to keep writing this blog in the way that I have been writing. I'm willing to take this risk right now because I believe in the things that I am writing. I stand behind them. Or at least stand behind the good faith in which I propose ideas tentatively in this space.

Himmlers of Hollywood

I link to this Guardian article by everyone's favorite Slovenian lit. critic Slavoj Zizek. He here criticizes the representation of torture on 24., with a particular focus on Season 4. Now I have all sorts of problems with the representation of torture on the show, for any number of reasons, but Zizek does a disservice to these arguments in what amounts to a really pretty confused account. It's for me a paradigmatic example of what's bad about the humanities right now; no one seems to be able to marshall a coherent argument to save his or her life. In this piece, for example, Zizek first says that 24 is ideological (and therefore bad) because it shows that people can live normal lives after torturing people; then he says well ok, maybe people can actually really live normal lives even after they torture people, but in that case 24 is even worse because its characters are able to detach themselves from the suffering they inflict; then finally he says, well, all this torture stuff used to be secrative, but what does it say about us that we're no longer being secretive about the fact that we're torturing people. It says that we're all pretty bad, which is perhaps arguable (although I don't know that open torture is worse than secret torture to the torture victim), but really has nothing to do with 24 as such. A shame.

Changes Keep Coming

So my dissertation keeps changing shape and size. Based on the various critiques that I received at my colloquium, I have been thinking about whether or not the concept of "postirony" has enough in it to carry a whole dissertation. I mean, it seemed that I could do a very detail-level sort of analysis of the fiction of the late 1990s, but now I am beginning to wonder if my project would be better served by expanding the focus. One of the major observations that came out of my coll. was that the authors that were my focus were almost exclusively white, male, and heterosexual. This is absolutely true (although I had included Zadie Smith's White Teeth in my final chapter) but it remained unclear how to resolve this problem, which is only ambiguously a problem when one realizes that the community of authors that I had been focusing on was largely self-constituted and this community of hip, postironic folk is indeed largely white, male, and heterosexual--and very very self-consciously so, almost to the point of paralysis.

I thought for a while that I could look at the often stiff relationship these mostly very liberal or left-leaning authors have towards non-white cultural artifacts and people: think of the number of postironic films today whose only non-white character is an adopted Sudanese war orphan or other Sally Struthers victim (I am quite serious: think of About Schmidt, Garden State, I [heart] Huckabees, etc. Think also of the mannered attempts at rendering African-American dialects in Infinite Jest.) Now, I am not sure if there is enough in this observation to carry a whole chapter--perhaps a part of a chapter.

The other approach, which I am seriously considering adopting, is to broaden the focus of my dissertation to examine hip irony as such. Doing so would allow me to move further back in time and do readings of books like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Thomas Pynchon's V. The point would be to document the ways in which African-American culture of the '40s and '50s became the model of the hip. This is, after all, what Norman Mailer is after in "The White Negro": the experience of blacks in America is no longer marginal--but, in an age of concentration camps and atom bombs--absolutely the norm. This approach seems more promising, because it would not involve bringing race, gender, sexuality into my project in a way not justified by the material itself.

Furthermore, I think I am going to bring in the term multiculturalism as a contested term in the '80s. I realized today (while at the gym) that hyphenated culture-terms really have quite a lot to do with each other. So I think I am going to do a chapter on the relationships between the terms countercultural, multiculturalism, and subculture. I think these concepts are pretty intimately related and have everything to do with new conceptions of identity politics paradigmatic of the '70s and '80s. Having a chapter on these paracultures (my lumping term, for now) would set up nicely the intellectual and cultural landscape which the postironists found themselves in--and found themselves rejecting.

So these are some thoughts towards where my project is going. As always, I reserve the right to absolutely change my mind and scrap the whole thing. But the project seems to be on firmer historical legging now. It's gone from a very narrow late '90s project to something about the post-WWII period as such, with a special focus on the '90s.

Transformations and Permutations

I am back in the U.S. after a pretty cool--and rather sick--trip to Barcelona for the New Year, where they stuff their mouths with grapes in the seconds leading up to midnight.

My colloquim went off pretty well, although every member of my committee had mutually irreconcilable advice on where I should take my dissertation. I am thinking about the diss. again and am contemplating taking it in the direction of looking at Coolness as a concept across a longer stretch of time than merely the '90s.

In fact, I have become enamoured of a new idea about how to do texual and literary analysis based on the development of a notion of "narrative economics" (as opposed to narratology) which takes a literary work as the amaglamation of a literal economy of textual tokens which come together in some structure. I am interested in documenting how narrative economies have real interactions with social and historical economies. To give you a simplified example of what I mean, think of a feature of narrative structure like length. A book that is "too long"--where too long is defined in relation to what is a socially normal length for a novel--will suffer a reduction in sales simply because people are less willing to devote substantial time to reading that novel. Correspondingly, however, a novel that is very long might gain in its status, which would feed back into its sales. This is the sort of analysis that I am beginning to find interesting and convincing as a way forward for literary studies. Maybe it's just crap but that's where I am right now.

How does this fit into a concept of coolness and postirony? Well, I'm not entirely sure. I am going to begin by writing a section on The Corrections. I am interested in the way that Franzen positions the novel as a kind of appeal to the "middlebrow"--a descent from literary heights--which he redacted when fully embaced by the "middlebrow" in the form of Oprah's book club. I want to try to tie this positioning to the specific structure Franzen deploys in constructing the novel. It might all end up blowing up in my face.

If so, I'll document that blowing up here on this blog.