The MLA special session that I helped organized, “Postirony in Theory and Fiction,” has been transforming in the last few weeks. One of our panelists found himself unable to participate in the special session after he got a job with a university press. This forced me to put out a call for papers [...]

… is out today.  My copy, which I ordered from Amazon back in November, is somewhere in Richmond, CA, at the moment.  Initial reviews are not so good.  Reviewers are calling the book too long, rambling, aimless, incoherent, Pynchon imitating his own, better novels, and sophomoric in its humor.  Well, even if it’s all those [...]

I’ve added a new plugin to Firefox that automatically allows me to add blog entries to this account.  Let’s see if this increases the frequency of my blogging.

I’m working on The Savage Girl portion of my chapter now–the part that will become the basis of the talk that I’ll be giving at the MLA this December. It’s a funny thing to actually be analyzing a novel in writing again after all these years of preparation, orals, colloquial promises that I would [...]

I received an email today from someone who pointed me to a wikipedia article called “Post-irony“. The entry reads as follows:
Post-irony is a point of view that involves the self-conscious appreciation of what would otherwise be seen as cheesy or ridiculous. One early reference to this mindset is in a 1999 Slate article. The [...]