My 2007 Stanford-Berkeley Proposal
I'm posting the abstract that I submitted for this year's Stanford-Berkeley Conference, which will be held at Stanford. This paper, when I write it, will become part of my third chapter, on Dave Eggers and McSweeney's.
How to be a Believer: Comparative Ontologies of Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' Left Behind (1995) and Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (1999)
In The Broken Estate (1999), James Wood argues that "[f]icton demands belief from us, and this request is demanding in part because we can choose not to believe." Wood here distinguishes between the ontological faith that religion requires and belief in fiction, which can only "gently request" that readers act "as if" they believed. Belief in fiction, it turns out, is only a metaphorical sort of belief. Wood's claim suffers from an obvious incoherence: the concept of belief is by its very constitution opposed to choice; a believer is someone who cannot help but hold his or her particular ontological convictions. My talk deploys the concept of ethos to argue that literature—both fiction and nonfiction—can and often does make strong ontological demands of its readers. To illustrate this point, I juxtapose two recent bestsellers that attempt to cultivate an ethos of belief in their readers: Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' Left Behind (1995) and Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (1999).
Grounding itself upon a premillennial dispensationalist reading of Revelation, and targeting a putative readership of "secular humanists" or insufficiently-committed Christians, Left Behind functions as an novelistic technology tooled to produce belief in its readers, to make its readers become born again evangelicals. Without the eschatological grounding of his more religious counterparts, Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius must find more secular means of eliciting reader belief. Bearing the subtitle "A Memoir based on a True Story," Eggers' book obsessively and continually produces guilt-ridden paratextual commentary on its own veracity, while insistently trying to undercut the charge that this commentary constitutes a form of irony. Eggers uses these paratexts, I will demonstrate, to construct an image of a Mean or Snarky Reader—identified at times with himself—against whom he writes and against whom he demands his readers sympathetically identify themselves.
On Zadie Smith’s "On Beauty"
I finished reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty this morning for a reading group that I'm helping to run. I have a sort of mixed reaction to the book. On the one hand, it's perfect for the argument that I am making in the introduction to my dissertation, which begins with a careful reading of a pair of essays that Smith recently wrote for The Guardian ("Fail Better" and "Read Better"). On the other hand, I sort of feel that the book is mediocre in a lot of ways. Its first part is well-developed and promising--and the correlations with Howards End seem initially interesting--but the characters and situations of the first part dissolve into a sea uninteresting episodes which Smith tries unsuccessfully to bring together again at the end of the novel.
Very little of consequence happens to these characters by the end of the novel. They do not quite suffer in believably human ways. Moreover, Smith has stripped her language of some of the more energetic syntactical pyrotechnics of White Teeth--not that I necessarily loved that novel either, but one got the sense that there was a raging ambition and energy to the writer of those sentences. On Beauty has all the marks of a rush job--a novel derived from its themes backwards--and not a novel where (a) the particular interiorities of its characters and historical moment and (b) the general thematic concerns that motivate its structure get generated at the same time, in dialogue with one another.
This is all to say that I am in the position of having to write about a novel I don't love. What to do? My plan is to write about On Beauty--perhaps a bit less than I would otherwise have, but still, it's relevant to my argument. Which is a sign to me that I have become, over the last couple years, transformed from someone who was quite happy writing impressionistic literary-critical essays to someone who has become strangely (for me) dedicated to following pretty strictly the logic of my own argument even at the expense of my personal aesthetic judgements. More generally, I have to admit that I often find myself in this position when talking about the postironists. While I recognize that their emerging aesthetic constitutes one of the most interesting and significant present-day attempts to articulate a new form of literary community and culture, I'm not always the biggest fan of all their books. Of the authors I'm writing about, only David Foster Wallace and William Gibson (who is not, strictly speaking, in the coterie of postironists) consistently live up to my expectations. Even Ellison and Pynchon I find to be choppy sometimes.
All Hail the Great Google
Howdy from dissertation-land, folks. Life is going along quite merrily. I'm writing a draft of my introduction and my trendspotting chapter--both are going well, I think--and I'm doing a bunch of other non-academic things: watching TV (since you're curious: Battlestar Galactica, 24, Heroes, I Love New York); revising the draft of my novel and trying to find a publisher/agent/whatever for it; and streamlining the topography of my electronic-life.
Toward the last two of these three projects, I've created a new homepage for myself (you'll notice the link on the right-hand column) using Google's new homepage-creation system. You can find my page here: http://lee.konstantinou.googlepages.com/. This system is pretty cool. I just wish blogger could integrate seamlessly into my Google web site and that I could absorb my older blog postings (on kitteneater) into this one for retagging.
This site, of course, is a work in progress, but I'm trying to use it to consolidate all my writing activities--both academic and personal--and to try to present something like a semi-professional face to the world. You can find a sample of my novel-in-progress on this site, if you're inclined to read it. If you know any publishers/agents, let me know. I'm looking.
Here's another change coming to this blog. I may begin posting on a more general array of topics and using tags to differentiate between them. Will I actually do this? Will I post any more than I have? Will I be able to decide what tag most properly maps onto a particular posting? Only time will tell.