Postirony at the MLA
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 for a pick-up panelist. I expected maybe a handful of responses, but the response was overwhelming and surprisingly strong. I received 10 very strong abstracts from individuals--graduate students and assistant professors--with projects very much in the orbit of the panel. So our panel, temporarily in crisis, looks as if it'll come out pretty well. The hardest part has been the process of deciding who to include and who to say no to. Kevin--the remaining co-panelist--and I have more or less decided who we want. We got so many good proposals that we're actually going to restructure the panel: we're going to invite two individuals to participate and Kevin is now going to provide a brief response after our presentations. What remains to do is for me to email those whom we've selected and get confirmation from them. Once that happens, I'll post the names of our new panelists and their abstracts. I'll use this space to give details related to the special session--how we're preparing, problems that arise, reflections on the concept of postirony, and finally a postmortem on the panel itself.
So: mark your calendars, folks, and be sure to get yourself to Philadelphia on Wednesday, December 27.
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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 be analyzing books in the near future... And yet. Somehow, despite my best-laid megalomaniacal plans for the greatness of this chapter, the writing itself seems to be coming along in a very mundane way. "Here's the first time that the word 'postirony' appears in Shakar's novel. Here's the second. Here's what it all means." Hm. It's better than that, actually, but I find that I can get much more energy out of those passages that I write which are preparation for or building up to the analysis of the book, but when writing about the book itself, well, I feel as if I'm to some degree stringing together quotations. I might as well just write "OK, folks, you've read the background, now go read the novel for yourself." I guess I understand why in many dissertations I've read I've found myself asking, "OK, this is fine, but is this it?" Here's my conclusion after four years of English majoring and now four plus years of Ph.D.ing: it can actually be pretty darn hard to write interesting things about books that amount to more than a sophisticatedly articulate recommendation that you go read the book. So: go read The Savage Girl. It's good. It uses the word postirony. I like the word postirony. I'll perhaps post portions of my MLA talk in this space when it's done so you can judge for yourself how successful or unsuccessful it is.
Postirony on Wikipedia
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 label has also been used to describe fan worship of musician Andrew W.K.
One mainstream use of "post-ironic" was on the O.C., in which one character uses the term to describe herself. Her character only starts using this term upon attending Brown University.
The article is marked for deletion on the grounds of "dictionary definition." I'm sort of two minds about the pending deletion. On the one hand, it's kind of cool that wikipedia, completely independently of my own work, has "discovered" postirony. On the other hand, there aren't many works that develop a sustained analysis of postirony. That's part of the point of my dissertation. So I'm not going to add anything to the article for now. Thoughts?