McCain the Ironist
Neal Gabler has written an interesting analysis of the McCain campaign for the NYT:
Seeming to view himself and the whole political process with a mix of amusement and bemusement, Mr. McCain is an ironist wooing a group of individuals [journalists] who regard ironic detachment more highly than sincerity or seriousness. He may be the first real postmodernist candidate for the presidency — the first to turn his press relations into the basis of his candidacy.
Gabler's analysis does not seem entirely right to me. Journalists do love McCain--and have consequently let him get away with many gaffs and misstatements, and (more seriously) have not questioned his open, nonmisstated, nonironic militarism.
But to say the press's esteem is the result of a shared love of irony--perhaps true enough--seems extremely simplistic and misses the bigger story. An ironic Democratic candidate could not, I suspect, get away with McCain's "candid" style; he (or she) would be pecked to death by the pundits. Moreover, many journalists seem to love Barack Obama precisely for his openly postironic style of political engagement; this seems to me a more plausible claim than that journalists love McCain for being ironic.
Obama perfectly well understands how our media system operates, and he can manipulate it just as well as McCain, albeit by means of a different strategy. Many pundits like Andrew Sullivan support Obama precisely in the terms of marketing theory (even if they don't realize it); Obama is a hip brand, a product line that makes a corrupted and ironic America feel good about itself again, a celebrity politician whose election will redeem us, etc. etc. Whether this idiom of support is an invention of the media itself or a cultivated strategy by the Obama camp remains unclear to me.
Whatever its other merits, the conceit of Gabler's argument gives me license to post it here and to write this silly slogan: If Barack Obama wins his party's nomination, as it seems he will, America will behold its first national political contest between irony (McCain) and postirony (Obama). For the sake of my academic career--obviously the only criteria relevant here--I sincerely hope that Brand Obama wins both the party nomination and the national election.
McCain the Ironist
Neal Gabler has written an interesting analysis of the McCain campaign for the NYT:
Seeming to view himself and the whole political process with a mix of amusement and bemusement, Mr. McCain is an ironist wooing a group of individuals [journalists] who regard ironic detachment more highly than sincerity or seriousness. He may be the first real postmodernist candidate for the presidency — the first to turn his press relations into the basis of his candidacy.
Gabler's analysis does not seem entirely right to me. Journalists do love McCain--and have consequently let him get away with many gaffs and misstatements, and (more seriously) have not questioned his open, nonmisstated, nonironic militarism.
But to say the press's esteem is the result of a shared love of irony--perhaps true enough--seems extremely simplistic and misses the bigger story. An ironic Democratic candidate could not, I suspect, get away with McCain's "candid" style; he (or she) would be pecked to death by the pundits. Moreover, many journalists seem to love Barack Obama precisely for his openly postironic style of political engagement; this seems to me a more plausible claim than that journalists love McCain for being ironic.
Obama perfectly well understands how our media system operates, and he can manipulate it just as well as McCain, albeit by means of a different strategy. Many pundits like Andrew Sullivan support Obama precisely in the terms of marketing theory (even if they don't realize it); Obama is a hip brand, a product line that makes a corrupted and ironic America feel good about itself again, a celebrity politician whose election will redeem us, etc. etc. Whether this idiom of support is an invention of the media itself or a cultivated strategy by the Obama camp remains unclear to me.
Whatever its other merits, the conceit of Gabler's argument gives me license to post it here and to write this silly slogan: If Barack Obama wins his party's nomination, as it seems he will, America will behold its first national political contest between irony (McCain) and postirony (Obama). For the sake of my academic career--obviously the only criteria relevant here--I sincerely hope that Brand Obama wins both the party nomination and the national election.
Cognitive Science and Irony
I usually hate these sorts of thing, but the Stanford Humanities Center had a great conference on Friday on cognitive science and literature. I unfortunately could only attend the morning session on irony, which featured Herb Clark (Psychology, Stanford), Joshua Landy (French, Stanford), and Elaine Scarry (English, Harvard) and was chaired by Lanier Anderson (Philosophy, Stanford). The discussion largely focused on Clark's 1984 paper (with Gerrig), "Irony as Pretense," which argues, against the so-called "mentioning" theory of irony, that when X is being ironic, he is pretending to be X* speaking to Y*, a hypothetical conversant who may or may not be present. Irony thus becomes a form of pretense, a dramaturgical critique by X of X*. I googled Clark's paper and discovered a 2007 book Irony in Language and Thought: A Cognitive Science Reader, a collection of papers on cognitive science research on irony.
I came to Stanford thinking I'd be working on the relationship between cognitive science and literature, but then decided it would be too difficult to do a decent dissertation on that relationship unless I seriously engaged with the cognitive science literature. Complicating matters, most English departments are very strongly historical in their orientation and institutional organization, implicitly demanding that grad students specialize in particular periods and authors if they hope to find jobs. The result of these pressures is that even the most theoretical dissertations are grounded in specific periods and historical horizons, which is not necessarily a bad thing. And all things considered, I would rather not have to conduct empirical research into how our brains process literature because the necessary tendency of such research is to quickly abstract away from particular examples to cognitive structures and processes. So I moved on to other interests, first to the genre of postmodern encyclopedic fiction (Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, Silko, Wallace) and then finally to postironic fiction, which I continue to work on. But it's nice to be led back, via postirony, to cognitive science. I want to try to make use of this literature in the diss., even if only in a peripheral way.
Cognitive Science and Irony
I usually hate these sorts of thing, but the Stanford Humanities Center had a great conference on Friday on cognitive science and literature. I unfortunately could only attend the morning session on irony, which featured Herb Clark (Psychology, Stanford), Joshua Landy (French, Stanford), and Elaine Scarry (English, Harvard) and was chaired by Lanier Anderson (Philosophy, Stanford). The discussion largely focused on Clark's 1984 paper (with Gerrig), "Irony as Pretense," which argues, against the so-called "mentioning" theory of irony, that when X is being ironic, he is pretending to be X* speaking to Y*, a hypothetical conversant who may or may not be present. Irony thus becomes a form of pretense, a dramaturgical critique by X of X*. I googled Clark's paper and discovered a 2007 book Irony in Language and Thought: A Cognitive Science Reader, a collection of papers on cognitive science research on irony.
I came to Stanford thinking I'd be working on the relationship between cognitive science and literature, but then decided it would be too difficult to do a decent dissertation on that relationship unless I seriously engaged with the cognitive science literature. Complicating matters, most English departments are very strongly historical in their orientation and institutional organization, implicitly demanding that grad students specialize in particular periods and authors if they hope to find jobs. The result of these pressures is that even the most theoretical dissertations are grounded in specific periods and historical horizons, which is not necessarily a bad thing. And all things considered, I would rather not have to conduct empirical research into how our brains process literature because the necessary tendency of such research is to quickly abstract away from particular examples to cognitive structures and processes. So I moved on to other interests, first to the genre of postmodern encyclopedic fiction (Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, Silko, Wallace) and then finally to postironic fiction, which I continue to work on. But it's nice to be led back, via postirony, to cognitive science. I want to try to make use of this literature in the diss., even if only in a peripheral way.
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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
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