Postironic Obama
A few months ago, I received an email asking whether I thought Barack Obama might be something like a postironic presidential candidate. I ignored the email at the time, too busy doing research on trendspotters and writing Pop Apocalypse (a decidedly ironic book). After the caucuses in Iowa, I listened to Obama's victory speech on YouTube and have started to think more deeply about the question. Is Obama postironic?
Inasmuch as our presidential elections are not only contests over ideologies and policies but also contests over our cultural values, it is inevitable that trends affecting the arts will also, eventually, affect our politics. If you share my temperament and political sensibility, you might even say that our political process is all culture all the way down, given that the range of effective policy choice is quite narrow.
Regardless of questions of content, Barack Obama seems undeniably a candidate whose style should be described as postironic. This label would not exactly constitute a historical argument: the etiology of political style does not track that of literary style. David Foster Wallace, for example, came of age and developed his literary commitments in very specific historical-academic contexts, which my dissertation reconstructs. Obama, meanwhile, has his own history and I would not make any substantive claims, without further research, about how Obama came to articulate his particular political style.
To call Obama postironic is instead to make a claim about the receptivity of young audiences to Obama's message. These audiences grew up in a hypermediated environment. As William Gibson has put it, they have a sense that "accessing media is what we do." They crave but are also suspicious of authenticity. Obama's political talent is to seem authentic to voters suspicious of the very concept of authenticity, voters who think they're smart enough to see through lies and deceits, who think they're much smarter than the people producing content on the other side of their screens.
Obama is a kind of performance artist whose character and sensibility harmonize with the post-New Left, post-'60s cultural commitments of Generation X-type voters. And given the similarity of Clinton's and Obama's policy offerings, political style has come to be the main factor that distinguishes them. Whatever else one might think about Obama, it seems undeniable that he's an incredibly talented political performer, someone almost engineered to energize voters between the ages of 18 and 45. He is something like the political equivalent of The Believer (which of course was originally going to be called The Optimist).
Is that a problem? I'm not sure. Do you believe in change?
Postironic Obama
A few months ago, I received an email asking whether I thought Barack Obama might be something like a postironic presidential candidate. I ignored the email at the time, too busy doing research on trendspotters and writing Pop Apocalypse (a decidedly ironic book). After the caucuses in Iowa, I listened to Obama's victory speech on YouTube and have started to think more deeply about the question. Is Obama postironic?
Inasmuch as our presidential elections are not only contests over ideologies and policies but also contests over our cultural values, it is inevitable that trends affecting the arts will also, eventually, affect our politics. If you share my temperament and political sensibility, you might even say that our political process is all culture all the way down, given that the range of effective policy choice is quite narrow.
Regardless of questions of content, Barack Obama seems undeniably a candidate whose style should be described as postironic. This label would not exactly constitute a historical argument: the etiology of political style does not track that of literary style. David Foster Wallace, for example, came of age and developed his literary commitments in very specific historical-academic contexts, which my dissertation reconstructs. Obama, meanwhile, has his own history and I would not make any substantive claims, without further research, about how Obama came to articulate his particular political style.
To call Obama postironic is instead to make a claim about the receptivity of young audiences to Obama's message. These audiences grew up in a hypermediated environment. As William Gibson has put it, they have a sense that "accessing media is what we do." They crave but are also suspicious of authenticity. Obama's political talent is to seem authentic to voters suspicious of the very concept of authenticity, voters who think they're smart enough to see through lies and deceits, who think they're much smarter than the people producing content on the other side of their screens.
Obama is a kind of performance artist whose character and sensibility harmonize with the post-New Left, post-'60s cultural commitments of Generation X-type voters. And given the similarity of Clinton's and Obama's policy offerings, political style has come to be the main factor that distinguishes them. Whatever else one might think about Obama, it seems undeniable that he's an incredibly talented political performer, someone almost engineered to energize voters between the ages of 18 and 45. He is something like the political equivalent of The Believer (which of course was originally going to be called The Optimist).
Is that a problem? I'm not sure. Do you believe in change?
Knowing Children
In the recent issue of n+1, Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff have published an excerpt of their new collaborative novel, Your Name Here, a book that unfortunately still hasn't found a publisher. The Last Samurai has been calling to me from my bookshelf for years now, one of those books I buy earnestly aspiring someday to read, so I read the n+1 excerpt with interest.
And was not disappointed. The excerpt is totally brilliant and packs more layers of cleverness and disorientation into one chapter than many wanna-be postmodernist epics do in seven-hundred pages. I could summarize these layers here, but such a summary would not begin to give a full sense of the total effect of weirdness the excerpt achieves (especially for those who know about DeWitt's much-publicized suicide attempt). My one concern about Your Name Here is that the multiple parallel realities and agendas the novel kicks off may become tedious after several hundred pages, especially if they do not build to something that resembles a narrative (or at least intellectual) climax. To be completely successful, the inventiveness of the novel's opening chapter needs to build to something larger than invention for its own sake.
Inspired by Your Name Here, I decided to make The Last Samurai my Christmas reading, pulling it off my shelf before I flew to New York. (Again, I'll forgo any attempt at plot summary and write a longer post about the novel after I've finished it.) I'm 150-pages in and pretty thrilled with what I've found. The Last Samurai is very specifically a book about the aspiration to read--the aspiration that has filled my bookshelf with a hodgepodge of books-to-read, books like The Last Samurai--the conviction that, somehow, books or even knowledge itself might save you. I understand this impulse intimately; it's the feeling I get before I buy histories of analytic philosophy or political-economy textbooks or Japanese for Beginners, books that I know I won't have time to read in the near future, books I sometimes don't read for years. When you see yourself buying books faster than you can read them, you begin to wonder about what's gone wrong. But even the secret fantasy of becoming a perfect speed-reader is not satisfying; if you could somehow read everything, and access everything you've read with perfect recall, problems would persist.
A desire for all-knowingness is part of what draws me to encyclopedic fiction of the Pynchon-DeLillo-Wallace variety. My earliest dissertation idea was an exploration of that genre (JR, Gravity's Rainbow, Underworld, Almanac of the Dead, Infinite Jest, etc.). I ultimately abandoned this dissertation idea because I found it difficult to convincingly frame such a large project; my readings of individual encyclopedic novels would have to be conducted from the literary-critical equivalent of 30,000 feet up; this hypothetical project, which I may still someday return to, might consequently read more like (bad) philosophy than literary criticism. None of which would be a huge issue if the project worked out, and if the philosophy had turned out to be good after all, but I actually find hitting the smaller target of postirony to be a more satisfying exercise, more grounded in the contingencies of '90s magazine culture and academic orthodoxy, a project that forces me to flex finer-grained mental muscles, more history than philosophy. As an added bonus, I also get to talk about many of the same authors I would otherwise have written about, writers I love, but in narrower--and more controlled--terms.
I have also turned away from the encyclopedic impulse for personal reasons: I increasingly see problems in it. Knowing everything is lovely (no irony here!); reading obscure books and becoming an expert in dead languages are genuinely wonderful things to do with one's time. But when knowledge becomes an object in itself apart from specific personal, social, political, or intellectual goals, things can go terribly wrong. Reading The Last Samurai, I feel as if DeWitt is making pretty much the same point, and that The Last Samurai is less of an encyclopedic novel than a critique of the encyclopedic impulse, the lust to know for its own sake. DeWitt's critique is, moreover, built on top of a compelling human story, the relationship between a mother and son. The desire to know is, after all, a human impulse, like any other, which has too rarely been taken seriously as human, more often depicted as the province of abstractions than people. All of which is to say that I'm really glad to be reading this book.
It may also find its way into the dissertation, paired with Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, in a chapter or concluding section that studies the figure of the "knowing child."
Knowing Children
In the recent issue of n+1, Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff have published an excerpt of their new collaborative novel, Your Name Here, a book that unfortunately still hasn't found a publisher. The Last Samurai has been calling to me from my bookshelf for years now, one of those books I buy earnestly aspiring someday to read, so I read the n+1 excerpt with interest.
And was not disappointed. The excerpt is totally brilliant and packs more layers of cleverness and disorientation into one chapter than many wanna-be postmodernist epics do in seven-hundred pages. I could summarize these layers here, but such a summary would not begin to give a full sense of the total effect of weirdness the excerpt achieves (especially for those who know about DeWitt's much-publicized suicide attempt). My one concern about Your Name Here is that the multiple parallel realities and agendas the novel kicks off may become tedious after several hundred pages, especially if they do not build to something that resembles a narrative (or at least intellectual) climax. To be completely successful, the inventiveness of the novel's opening chapter needs to build to something larger than invention for its own sake.
Inspired by Your Name Here, I decided to make The Last Samurai my Christmas reading, pulling it off my shelf before I flew to New York. (Again, I'll forgo any attempt at plot summary and write a longer post about the novel after I've finished it.) I'm 150-pages in and pretty thrilled with what I've found. The Last Samurai is very specifically a book about the aspiration to read--the aspiration that has filled my bookshelf with a hodgepodge of books-to-read, books like The Last Samurai--the conviction that, somehow, books or even knowledge itself might save you. I understand this impulse intimately; it's the feeling I get before I buy histories of analytic philosophy or political-economy textbooks or Japanese for Beginners, books that I know I won't have time to read in the near future, books I sometimes don't read for years. When you see yourself buying books faster than you can read them, you begin to wonder about what's gone wrong. But even the secret fantasy of becoming a perfect speed-reader is not satisfying; if you could somehow read everything, and access everything you've read with perfect recall, problems would persist.
A desire for all-knowingness is part of what draws me to encyclopedic fiction of the Pynchon-DeLillo-Wallace variety. My earliest dissertation idea was an exploration of that genre (JR, Gravity's Rainbow, Underworld, Almanac of the Dead, Infinite Jest, etc.). I ultimately abandoned this dissertation idea because I found it difficult to convincingly frame such a large project; my readings of individual encyclopedic novels would have to be conducted from the literary-critical equivalent of 30,000 feet up; this hypothetical project, which I may still someday return to, might consequently read more like (bad) philosophy than literary criticism. None of which would be a huge issue if the project worked out, and if the philosophy had turned out to be good after all, but I actually find hitting the smaller target of postirony to be a more satisfying exercise, more grounded in the contingencies of '90s magazine culture and academic orthodoxy, a project that forces me to flex finer-grained mental muscles, more history than philosophy. As an added bonus, I also get to talk about many of the same authors I would otherwise have written about, writers I love, but in narrower--and more controlled--terms.
I have also turned away from the encyclopedic impulse for personal reasons: I increasingly see problems in it. Knowing everything is lovely (no irony here!); reading obscure books and becoming an expert in dead languages are genuinely wonderful things to do with one's time. But when knowledge becomes an object in itself apart from specific personal, social, political, or intellectual goals, things can go terribly wrong. Reading The Last Samurai, I feel as if DeWitt is making pretty much the same point, and that The Last Samurai is less of an encyclopedic novel than a critique of the encyclopedic impulse, the lust to know for its own sake. DeWitt's critique is, moreover, built on top of a compelling human story, the relationship between a mother and son. The desire to know is, after all, a human impulse, like any other, which has too rarely been taken seriously as human, more often depicted as the province of abstractions than people. All of which is to say that I'm really glad to be reading this book.
It may also find its way into the dissertation, paired with Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, in a chapter or concluding section that studies the figure of the "knowing child."
The Broom of the System
I finished reading David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System today (for the first time), part of my preparation to write the Person Chapter of the diss. The writing of the Hipster Chapter also continues, less apace than I'd prefer, but still. I'm reading a fantastic history of the hugely-important literary journal Kenyon Review (by Marian Janssen) and have just started Arnold Rampersad's newly-released biography of Ralph Ellison--which also looks very promising. Work on my own novel has begun to compete for brain bandwidth with all of the aforementioned stuff, but I'm in a period of relative calm vis-a-vis Pop Apocalypse. Just turned in a revised draft to my editor.
All of which is to say, when combined with fellowship applications and other projects, that this is one of the busiest times in my writing/thinking life, like ever, but I can't complain; it's a very wonderful gift to have this time and these opportunities. Many equally if not more worthy people don't have chances like these.
But back to DFW:
Reading Broom was a trip--it'll definitely find its way into the Infinite Jest-centered Person Chapter of the diss. What has begun to obsess me in my critical writing is how very much the educational contexts of a writer's background shape his or her production. What makes Broom so much of a trip then is the extensiveness and sophistication with which its author comments on the format and content of fiction produced in the MFA and creative-writing classroom circa the mid-to-late '80s. And also takes on the still-strong theoretical orthodoxies of that paradoxically Reaganesque-cum-poststructuralist moment.
That is, it seems as if DFW was keenly aware of what the dominant and competing strands of literary orthodoxy were at the time that he was writing. How his analysis of and reaction to these orthodoxies launched his career-trajectory and how his fictional and essayistic responses have set an agenda for his contemporaries is the subject of my person chapter--and the Believer Chapter that follows from it.
When discussing Broom, I think I will want to focus these questions through an analysis of how DFW fictionally reimagines the concept of a "person." Can a talking parrot be a person? How are fictional characters like people--and/or not? Does a notion of communication serve as the logical foundation for personhood or does the logical priority go the other way around (person then communication)?
Based on Wallace's reading of Wittgenstein, I suspect that he takes communication as the minimal lynch-pin of what it means to be a person. From this, various consequences follow, including of course the notion that irony is destructive to our humanity and personhood.
These are my preliminary thoughts as I try to wrap my mind around Broom, which anticipates Infinite Jest in lots of important ways, though it's a less-good novel by comparison. Then again, DFW wrote the book when he was in his early twenties, so he can maybe be forgiven for its flaws, I think.
The Broom of the System
I finished reading David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System today (for the first time), part of my preparation to write the Person Chapter of the diss. The writing of the Hipster Chapter also continues, less apace than I'd prefer, but still. I'm reading a fantastic history of the hugely-important literary journal Kenyon Review (by Marian Janssen) and have just started Arnold Rampersad's newly-released biography of Ralph Ellison--which also looks very promising. Work on my own novel has begun to compete for brain bandwidth with all of the aforementioned stuff, but I'm in a period of relative calm vis-a-vis Pop Apocalypse. Just turned in a revised draft to my editor.
All of which is to say, when combined with fellowship applications and other projects, that this is one of the busiest times in my writing/thinking life, like ever, but I can't complain; it's a very wonderful gift to have this time and these opportunities. Many equally if not more worthy people don't have chances like these.
But back to DFW:
Reading Broom was a trip--it'll definitely find its way into the Infinite Jest-centered Person Chapter of the diss. What has begun to obsess me in my critical writing is how very much the educational contexts of a writer's background shape his or her production. What makes Broom so much of a trip then is the extensiveness and sophistication with which its author comments on the format and content of fiction produced in the MFA and creative-writing classroom circa the mid-to-late '80s. And also takes on the still-strong theoretical orthodoxies of that paradoxically Reaganesque-cum-poststructuralist moment.
That is, it seems as if DFW was keenly aware of what the dominant and competing strands of literary orthodoxy were at the time that he was writing. How his analysis of and reaction to these orthodoxies launched his career-trajectory and how his fictional and essayistic responses have set an agenda for his contemporaries is the subject of my person chapter--and the Believer Chapter that follows from it.
When discussing Broom, I think I will want to focus these questions through an analysis of how DFW fictionally reimagines the concept of a "person." Can a talking parrot be a person? How are fictional characters like people--and/or not? Does a notion of communication serve as the logical foundation for personhood or does the logical priority go the other way around (person then communication)?
Based on Wallace's reading of Wittgenstein, I suspect that he takes communication as the minimal lynch-pin of what it means to be a person. From this, various consequences follow, including of course the notion that irony is destructive to our humanity and personhood.
These are my preliminary thoughts as I try to wrap my mind around Broom, which anticipates Infinite Jest in lots of important ways, though it's a less-good novel by comparison. Then again, DFW wrote the book when he was in his early twenties, so he can maybe be forgiven for its flaws, I think.
Agented
In another deviation from academic matters--but not entirely--I'm now agented, and well-agented.
The interesting academic angle on this development comes from a conversation I had yesterday with Matt Jockers, a professor in the English department who does technology-related stuff. We talked about the possibility of building or developing some sort of social-networking application that I could use to map connections among authors and publications for my dissertation.
My hunch is that social-networking theory and analysis might be a useful way of learning how and why certain authors are connected to other authors. Why do David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen mutually blurb each other? Probably because they were friends. Why did Franzen blurb Alex Shakar's The Savage Girl? What is the relationship between the blurb and the fact that they share an agent? Whatever the answer for these particular questions, I think literary studies has too often ignored the ways in which social networks shape or can help explain aspects of literary history. At best we have a vague sense that lots of modernists were running around Paris together, etc.
For my project, my interest is in building a model of the networks surrounding Dave Eggers and the whole McSweeney's publishing operation. My operating theory, for now at least, is that aesthetic postirony--quirkiness, Brooklynite precocity, Wes-Andersonian bric-à-bracity--has as much to do with social networks as anything else. We tend to speak and write like our friends and neighbors. In an increasingly globalized age, where family relations dominate our fates less than they have, our affiliations and voluntary associations can be very powerful indeed. It's what used to be called "peer pressure," but is probably better referred to as something like "aesthetic entropy."
Agented
In another deviation from academic matters--but not entirely--I'm now agented, and well-agented.
The interesting academic angle on this development comes from a conversation I had yesterday with Matt Jockers, a professor in the English department who does technology-related stuff. We talked about the possibility of building or developing some sort of social-networking application that I could use to map connections among authors and publications for my dissertation.
My hunch is that social-networking theory and analysis might be a useful way of learning how and why certain authors are connected to other authors. Why do David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen mutually blurb each other? Probably because they were friends. Why did Franzen blurb Alex Shakar's The Savage Girl? What is the relationship between the blurb and the fact that they share an agent? Whatever the answer for these particular questions, I think literary studies has too often ignored the ways in which social networks shape or can help explain aspects of literary history. At best we have a vague sense that lots of modernists were running around Paris together, etc.
For my project, my interest is in building a model of the networks surrounding Dave Eggers and the whole McSweeney's publishing operation. My operating theory, for now at least, is that aesthetic postirony--quirkiness, Brooklynite precocity, Wes-Andersonian bric-à-bracity--has as much to do with social networks as anything else. We tend to speak and write like our friends and neighbors. In an increasingly globalized age, where family relations dominate our fates less than they have, our affiliations and voluntary associations can be very powerful indeed. It's what used to be called "peer pressure," but is probably better referred to as something like "aesthetic entropy."
Is Claire Messud Wearing Any Clothes?
This is a question I have been sleeping on, fitfully. I finished The Emperor's Children last night and I really wanted to be able to post a wholly enthusiastic assessment of it here, but I can't. First, let's get rid of business. This is a book that has to appear in the epilogue of my dissertation, which discusses literary reactions to the Sept. 11 attacks. My primary focus in this epilogue is going to be on how in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Jonathan Safran Foer uses the figure and style of "the child" as a way of modeling what he takes to be an ethical or appropriate literary response to an event which, it seems clear, reminds him of the Holocaust, Dresden, Hiroshima, and All Manner of Bad Historical Thing. Messud approaches Sept. 11 more directly, making it a crucial hinge around which her handful of plots turn. Sept. 11 changes her characters. In short, it does the work that she ought to be doing herself as a novelist.
But before dealing with its problems, I should admit I really enjoyed the first three parts of the novel, approximately the first three hundred pages. Messud is good at writing one kind of sentence--a sort of Henry James Lite sentence--but it's a beautiful sentence and can achieve impressive effects at the level of the paragraph and the chapter. Some of the novel's early chapters are really terrific, scathingly ironic in the best way. Their satirical edge, and enormous energy, was partly what compelled me to buy the book in the first place. Unfortunately Messud becomes a victim of her own success; she flails when she tries to deviate from her standard style. Efforts at writing fake newspaper columns or at miming styles other than her preferred one creak awkwardly. This is also a symptom of the fact that Messud has problems writing characters with depth and dimension. Everyone speaks like everyone else, thinks like everyone else, experiencing the world through the prisim of her Henry James Lite style, which at first seems as if it's an ironic commentary on how the minds of these characters work but turns instead into an inadvertently commentary on Messud herself.
What differentiates her two female protagonists, Danielle and Marina, are their relative levels of beauty and their jobs. Her two main gay characters, Julius and David, though supposedly very different sorts of gay men, end up seeming like catty clones of each other, stereotypes incarnate. Murray Thwaite, the intellectual luminary at the center of the narrative--the "emperor" of the title--is also paper-thin. His intellectual pedigree and his esteem in the liberal community are often referred to but never persuasively demonstrated; he manages not to say even one smart thing in 470 pages, which may be part of the novel's point about him, but Messud doesn't do nearly enough to build him up before she tears him down.
Only Booty, Murray's nephew, rises above the words on the page that describe him. Only he makes a meaningful choice when confronted with the terrorist attacks--and a hilarious one at that. The rest of her characters are constitutionally unable to make meaningful choices because their personhood has not been sufficiently developed in the pages that precede the moment of the attack. Danielle becomes depressed. Murray remains more or less the same. Marina and Julius are only superficially scarred. I came to this novel prepared to like it--hell, even to love it--and for about three hundred pages I did, on its own terms, in its own style. Once September rolled around, the whole thing fell apart for me. Which does not of course mean I won't write about the book in my dissertation. I will.
Is Claire Messud Wearing Any Clothes?
This is a question I have been sleeping on, fitfully. I finished The Emperor's Children last night and I really wanted to be able to post a wholly enthusiastic assessment of it here, but I can't. First, let's get rid of business. This is a book that has to appear in the epilogue of my dissertation, which discusses literary reactions to the Sept. 11 attacks. My primary focus in this epilogue is going to be on how in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Jonathan Safran Foer uses the figure and style of "the child" as a way of modeling what he takes to be an ethical or appropriate literary response to an event which, it seems clear, reminds him of the Holocaust, Dresden, Hiroshima, and All Manner of Bad Historical Thing. Messud approaches Sept. 11 more directly, making it a crucial hinge around which her handful of plots turn. Sept. 11 changes her characters. In short, it does the work that she ought to be doing herself as a novelist.
But before dealing with its problems, I should admit I really enjoyed the first three parts of the novel, approximately the first three hundred pages. Messud is good at writing one kind of sentence--a sort of Henry James Lite sentence--but it's a beautiful sentence and can achieve impressive effects at the level of the paragraph and the chapter. Some of the novel's early chapters are really terrific, scathingly ironic in the best way. Their satirical edge, and enormous energy, was partly what compelled me to buy the book in the first place. Unfortunately Messud becomes a victim of her own success; she flails when she tries to deviate from her standard style. Efforts at writing fake newspaper columns or at miming styles other than her preferred one creak awkwardly. This is also a symptom of the fact that Messud has problems writing characters with depth and dimension. Everyone speaks like everyone else, thinks like everyone else, experiencing the world through the prisim of her Henry James Lite style, which at first seems as if it's an ironic commentary on how the minds of these characters work but turns instead into an inadvertently commentary on Messud herself.
What differentiates her two female protagonists, Danielle and Marina, are their relative levels of beauty and their jobs. Her two main gay characters, Julius and David, though supposedly very different sorts of gay men, end up seeming like catty clones of each other, stereotypes incarnate. Murray Thwaite, the intellectual luminary at the center of the narrative--the "emperor" of the title--is also paper-thin. His intellectual pedigree and his esteem in the liberal community are often referred to but never persuasively demonstrated; he manages not to say even one smart thing in 470 pages, which may be part of the novel's point about him, but Messud doesn't do nearly enough to build him up before she tears him down.
Only Booty, Murray's nephew, rises above the words on the page that describe him. Only he makes a meaningful choice when confronted with the terrorist attacks--and a hilarious one at that. The rest of her characters are constitutionally unable to make meaningful choices because their personhood has not been sufficiently developed in the pages that precede the moment of the attack. Danielle becomes depressed. Murray remains more or less the same. Marina and Julius are only superficially scarred. I came to this novel prepared to like it--hell, even to love it--and for about three hundred pages I did, on its own terms, in its own style. Once September rolled around, the whole thing fell apart for me. Which does not of course mean I won't write about the book in my dissertation. I will.
Pages
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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