Reflections on MLA ’06
I haven't yet had a chance to write an account of the "Postirony in Theory and Fiction" special session I co-organized for MLA '06. Since I know you're all very busy people, I'll be brief: the special session was very successful.
The papers, all of which had very different takes on postirony, were quite interesting. Given the last-minute reshuffling of the structure of the panel, we seemed surprisingly as if we had been planning things this way all along. Kevin unfortunately didn't have enough time to go through the entirety of his response, but his response was illuminating. Something like 20-25 people were in the audience--a nice number of people for the first day of the conference. Among our audience members was Linda Hutcheon, who seemed like a very gracious and an extremely nice person.
Most of all the panel got me excited about my dissertation again. Not that I had lost my enthusiasm for all things postironic (heaven forbid!) but reading and writing is lonely work. Being in a room with people who've pretty much read the same books as you and care about the same issues was inspiring.
I'm also excited because while filling out my fellowship applications I finally hit upon what I think will be the book-level argument of my dissertation. That is, I now have a story to tell myself about my Big Claims which will hopefully plug in to the chapters and subsections that I write. The whole and the parts may in fact have something like a relationship. Before I had a topic; now I also have an argument about that topic.
The Birth of American Fusion Food
As I stared at the sky blue paint on the walls and tall-backed tan couches spread through the restaurant, I had a minor revelation: We were in a fusion restaurant, a fusion burger joint. What is the meaning of fusion? Well, it seems to me that the essential thing about fusion food is that it acts as a kind of cultural bridge between exotic, ethnic, other-than-normal food and the hungry but wannabe-cosmopolitan denizens of the kingdom of California. What a fusion burger joint does then is that it makes what is ostensibly one's "native" food--culturally unmarked--and marks it for the first time as cultural. Only in an age where taste has become globalized is it even thinkable to treat things like hamburgers as if they were novelty items, objects whose use needs to be explained to first-time customers and whose customizability serves as something like a competitive advantage over all those other hamburger joints. I mean, c'mon, do you really need to ask me if I've been here before? "We" all know how to eat hamburgers, right? This isn't P.F. Chang's or something--where, presumably, we need an explanation for how to eat those culturally "exotic" lettuce wraps.
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About Me
I'm a novelist, scholar of post-WWII U.S. fiction, and ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Princeton University. My first novel, Pop Apocalypse, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2009. 
I co-edited (with Samuel Cohen) a collection of creative and critical essays, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, which was released by the University of Iowa Press in 2012.
My second novel, Hamsterstan, was recently completed. 
I'm working on a literary history of countercultural irony from Ralph Ellison to David Foster Wallace, which is under contract with Harvard University Press. My writing has appeared in The Believer, boundary 2, io9, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. I blog pretty regularly over at Arcade. In the fall, I will become an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. If this litany of interesting biographical tidbits doesn't slake your fact-thirst, please feel free to contact me at lee [dot] konstantinou [at sign] gmail [dot] com or via Facebook. |
@lkonstan
- @LeifSorensen1 Will do. http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- Off to Chicago tomorrow for "Comics: Philosophy & Practice." Superexciting lineup: http://t.co/jw7sQfeJ What should I do at night? http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- @Ed_Raso Oppositional in the sense that they oppose the degrading effects of a dominant cultural irony, and want a positive alternative. http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- Got my copy of J R from @Dalkey_Archive today. #OccupyGaddis commences in a little more than 2 weeks at @LAReviewofBooks http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- @Ed_Raso His stories and essays often geographically counterpose a credulous midwest against a cynical coastal elite. He wanted a third way. http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- @Ed_Raso Totally agree. Wallace took that common Gen X feeling and turned it into interesting art. I think his Midwestern-ness mattered... http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
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