I read for the first time James Wood’s essay on hysterical realism in his book of criticism, The Irresponsible Self. I had heard the term frequently for a few years now–and had a reasonable sense of what it meant, and that Wood had coined the term as a response to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth–but [...]

After sorting through about a dozen remarkably smart and on-target abstracts for the MLA, we’ve decided that we couldn’t resist saying yes to more than one. What this means is that “Postirony in Theory and Fiction” will now have a total of four participants (Linda Hutcheon, who initially signed on during the application phase, [...]