Get with the program, people
Check it out:
An interview I conducted with UCLA English Professor Mark McGurl has just been released in this month's Believer magazine. The original interview was fairly far-reaching and lively, but has here been shortened to a still-lively-even-if-slightly-less-far-reaching "micro-interview," spread through the May issue.
When you're done reading the interview, do also check out Mark's excellent new book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, which is sure to rearrange the mental furniture of scholars and critics of postwar American fiction, perhaps even installing a new sofa couch or two.
But don't be put off by all that. The book is also quite readable and engaging in a public intellectual sort of way. The book actually partly helped dampen some of my prejudices and stereotyped impressions about MFA programs, which I avoided, assuming falsely that they were all homogeneously dedicated to the reproduction of minimalist realism.
Not that I don't love minimialist realism, but it's just not what I wanted to do as a writer. Little did I know!
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?
Enter the Snark
What should the critic of postironic fiction (i.e., me) make of this American Scholar article by Melvin Jules Bukiet?
You can see it from Manhattan if you look carefully across the East River. You can even go there if you follow a young couple (he’s got a goatee and she has a ponytail) onto the F train. But if you’re not blessed to reside within walking distance of Prospect Park, you can always read about Brooklyn in the work of the writers who live there or find inspiration there. Brooklyn principles can be found anywhere that young people gather to share their search for love and meaning, a search that they alone are qualified to pursue by virtue of their pristine vision of the deep oneness of things. Whereas physical danger or emotional grief leaves most people lonely or ruined or dead, they triumph over adversity.
To achieve this miracle, certain writers produce Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness. The only thing that’s more wondrous than the BBoW narratives themselves is the vanity of the authors who deliver their epistles from Fort Greene with mock-naïve astonishment, as if saying: “I can’t really believe I’m writing this. And it’s such an honor that you’re reading it.” Actually, they’re as vain and mercenary as anyone else, but they mask these less endearing traits under the smiley façade of an illusory Eden they’ve recreated in the low-rise borough across the water from corrupt Manhattan.
I can't say that there is much of substance to agree with or critique here. This is a piece about taste. It is a salvo in a war of taste, of sensibility, of ethos. Bracketing my own tastes, I would point out that Bukiet becomes in his essay precisely the maligned figure the postironists themselves call "The Snark." Heidi Julavits sought to preemptively foreclose the legitimacy this critical stance in relation to the Brooklynite writers in her inaugural essay of The Believer.
Beyond these preliminary thoughts, I don't much to say about Bukiet's article, not yet anyway. I have to reflect some more on it, but it will inevitably find its way into my chapter on the figure of the "the believer," which as I've mentioned before analyzes Eggers's memoir, the publications he subsequently founded, and the Left Behind evangelical series, among other believer-related things.
Enter the Snark
What should the critic of postironic fiction (i.e., me) make of this American Scholar article by Melvin Jules Bukiet?
You can see it from Manhattan if you look carefully across the East River. You can even go there if you follow a young couple (he’s got a goatee and she has a ponytail) onto the F train. But if you’re not blessed to reside within walking distance of Prospect Park, you can always read about Brooklyn in the work of the writers who live there or find inspiration there. Brooklyn principles can be found anywhere that young people gather to share their search for love and meaning, a search that they alone are qualified to pursue by virtue of their pristine vision of the deep oneness of things. Whereas physical danger or emotional grief leaves most people lonely or ruined or dead, they triumph over adversity.
To achieve this miracle, certain writers produce Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness. The only thing that’s more wondrous than the BBoW narratives themselves is the vanity of the authors who deliver their epistles from Fort Greene with mock-naïve astonishment, as if saying: “I can’t really believe I’m writing this. And it’s such an honor that you’re reading it.” Actually, they’re as vain and mercenary as anyone else, but they mask these less endearing traits under the smiley façade of an illusory Eden they’ve recreated in the low-rise borough across the water from corrupt Manhattan.
I can't say that there is much of substance to agree with or critique here. This is a piece about taste. It is a salvo in a war of taste, of sensibility, of ethos. Bracketing my own tastes, I would point out that Bukiet becomes in his essay precisely the maligned figure the postironists themselves call "The Snark." Heidi Julavits sought to preemptively foreclose the legitimacy this critical stance in relation to the Brooklynite writers in her inaugural essay of The Believer.
Beyond these preliminary thoughts, I don't much to say about Bukiet's article, not yet anyway. I have to reflect some more on it, but it will inevitably find its way into my chapter on the figure of the "the believer," which as I've mentioned before analyzes Eggers's memoir, the publications he subsequently founded, and the Left Behind evangelical series, among other believer-related things.