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  • Lee Konstantinou is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He studies twentieth ... moreedit
Charting a new course in the criticism of postwar fiction, Cool Characters examines the changing status of irony in American cultural and political life from World War II to the present, showing how irony migrated from the countercultural... more
Charting a new course in the criticism of postwar fiction, Cool Characters examines the changing status of irony in American cultural and political life from World War II to the present, showing how irony migrated from the countercultural margins of the 1950s to the cultural mainstream of the 1980s. Along the way, irony was absorbed into postmodern theory and ultimately become a target of recent writers who have sought to create a practice of “postirony” that might move beyond its limitations.

As a concept, irony has been theorized from countless angles, but Cool Characters argues that it is best understood as an ethos: an attitude or orientation toward the world, embodied in different character types, articulated via literary style. Lee Konstantinou traces five such types―the hipster, the punk, the believer, the coolhunter, and the occupier―in new interpretations of works by authors including Ralph Ellison, William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Dave Eggers, William Gibson, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem, and Rachel Kushner.

For earlier generations of writers, irony was something vital to be embraced, but beginning most dramatically with David Foster Wallace, dissatisfaction with irony, especially with its alleged tendency to promote cynicism and political passivity, gained force. Postirony―the endpoint in an arc that begins with naive belief, passes through irony, and arrives at a new form of contingent conviction―illuminates the literary environment that has flourished in the United States since the 1990s.
Considered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace was at the height of his creative powers when he committed suicide in 2008. In a sweeping portrait of Wallace’s writing and thought and as a measure of... more
Considered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace was at the height of his creative powers when he committed suicide in 2008. In a sweeping portrait of Wallace’s writing and thought and as a measure of his importance in literary history, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace gathers cutting-edge, field-defining scholarship by critics alongside remembrances by many of his writer friends, who include some of the world’s most influential authors.

In this elegant volume, literary critics scrutinize the existing Wallace scholarship and at the same time pioneer new ways of understanding Wallace’s fiction and journalism. In critical essays exploring a variety of topics—including Wallace’s relationship to American literary history, his place in literary journalism, his complicated relationship to his postmodernist predecessors, the formal difficulties of his 1996 magnum opus Infinite Jest, his environmental imagination, and the “social life” of his fiction and nonfiction—contributors plumb sources as diverse as Amazon.com reader recommendations, professional book reviews, the 2009 Infinite Summer project, and the David Foster Wallace archive at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center.

The creative writers—including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, and David Lipsky, and Wallace’s Little, Brown editor, Michael Pietsch—reflect on the person behind the volumes of fiction and nonfiction created during the author’s too-short life.

All of the essays, critical and creative alike, are written in an accessible style that does not presume any background in Wallace criticism. Whether the reader is an expert in all things David Foster Wallace, a casual fan of his fiction and nonfiction, or completely new to Wallace, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace will reveal the power and innovation that defined his contribution to literary life and to self-understanding. This illuminating volume is destined to shape our understanding of Wallace, his writing, and his place in history.""
This article thinks about the relationship between democracy and the novel through the analysis of two recent science fiction series, Malka Older’s The Centenal Cycle (2016–2018) and Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota (2016–2021). Both series... more
This article thinks about the relationship between democracy and the novel through the analysis of two recent science fiction series, Malka Older’s The Centenal Cycle (2016–2018) and Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota (2016–2021). Both series imagine future planetary democracies in which the US is figured as a conspicuous absence. The Centenal Cycle is set in a future world of planetary “micro-democracy,” in which sovereignty devolves from nation-states to “centenals” consisting of 100,000 people. Terra Ignota, meanwhile, is set in a world dominated by “Hives,” voluntary associations united by hobbies, interests, and values. Both series try to imagine futures in which the US no longer enjoys planetary hegemony, but no other nation-state or regional hegemon has replaced it. They therefore engage in speculations not only about the future of the US but also about possible futures in which the concept of “Westphalian sovereignty” has lost its force and in which capital’s systemic cycles of accumulation, as described by Giovanni Arrighi, no longer operate. In engaging in these speculations, Older and Palmer join recent political conversations that struggle to understand what a “post-American” geopolitical order might look like. Science fiction, this essay argues, offers special formal resources for thinking through such vexed possibilities.
The neoliberal period has seen myriad new and formerly marginalized cultural forms aspire to the status of art. This cluster explores seven specific newly christened arts -- television, comics, audiobooks, video games, Electronic Dance... more
The neoliberal period has seen myriad new and formerly marginalized cultural forms aspire to the status of art. This cluster explores seven specific newly christened arts -- television, comics, audiobooks, video games, Electronic Dance Music, podcasts, globalized haute cuisine -- to explore how neoliberalism has changed the historical category of art.
This article discusses the career of the cartoonist Rob Liefeld -- and suggests that Liefeld's (famously bad) art teaches us something about the terms by which the comics world of the early 1990s came to see the possibility for artistic... more
This article discusses the career of the cartoonist Rob Liefeld -- and suggests that Liefeld's (famously bad) art teaches us something about the terms by which the comics world of the early 1990s came to see the possibility for artistic autonomy in the figure of the creator-owner.
Argues that Richard McGuire's Here (2014) repurposes the affordances of mobile computing to think about the human relationship to Deep Time.
Short paper on the relationship of postcritique to Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad."
Research Interests:
An analysis of how Lewis Hyde's "The Gift" influenced various contemporary fiction writes, with a special focus on Zadie Smith's second novel "The Autograph Man." Critiques the argument that treating art as a gift offers a means by which... more
An analysis of how Lewis Hyde's "The Gift" influenced various contemporary fiction writes, with a special focus on Zadie Smith's second novel "The Autograph Man." Critiques the argument that treating art as a gift offers a means by which to avoid commodification.
A discussion of David Foster Wallace's relationship to world literature as well as an analysis of his novella "The Suffering Channel" (2004). I argue approaching the "worldliness" of texts in terms of representation has limitations.
This essay analyzes William Gibson's eighth novel, Pattern Recognition, and argues that Gibson uses literary style to invite his readers to embrace the ethos of the coolhunter. Modeled on but not identical to Cayce Pollard's "violent... more
This essay analyzes William Gibson's eighth novel, Pattern Recognition, and argues that Gibson uses literary style to invite his readers to embrace the ethos of the coolhunter. Modeled on but not identical to Cayce Pollard's "violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace," Gibson's proposed coolhunting ethos treats the brand name as a cognitive map of the multinational economic supply chains that underlie the glossy surface of the brand.

The need for such a mapping exists because, across many industries, the brand has been transformed from a way of insuring product quality into a piece of intellectual property valuable in and of itself. As multinational corporations have outsourced less profitable areas of production, and brand ownership has become relatively more profitable, the connection between any particular brand name and the supply chains supporting it is increasingly concealed within a global maze of anonymous subcontractors.

Gibson's coolhunting aesthetic seeks to transform the reader's relationship to the "logo-maze," to reconnect the free-floating brand to the hidden supply chains behind it. I relate this project of relinking to what Bruce Robbins has called the "sweatshop sublime" and to popular notions of ethical consumption and argue that Gibson's coolhunter is a modified type of ethical consumer, a person able to map economic systems onto personal meanings as meanings, translating the behavior of the market not into a more just price point at the mall but into an aesthetic sensibility."""
A political re-assessment of anti-consumerist science fiction. I argue that midcentury anti-consumerist SF had an ambivalent relationship to a Cold War political economy built around the problem of managing aggregate demand. SF wanted to... more
A political re-assessment of anti-consumerist science fiction. I argue that midcentury anti-consumerist SF had an ambivalent relationship to a Cold War political economy built around the problem of managing aggregate demand. SF wanted to resist the celebration of economic growth but was also forced to confront the possibility that the logic of economic growth was, in fact, foundational to SF-modes of speculation and world-building. I discuss "The Space Merchants," "The Jetsons," Philip K. Dick's "Exhibit Piece," Pamela Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe," and many other works of midcentury SF.
A survey of different artistic and literary attempts to critique, debunk, and otherwise move beyond the legacy of David Foster Wallace. Argues that moving beyond Wallace is made more difficult because Wallace prefigures almost all the... more
A survey of different artistic and literary attempts to critique, debunk, and otherwise move beyond the legacy of David Foster Wallace. Argues that moving beyond Wallace is made more difficult because Wallace prefigures almost all the strategies one might use to overcome him within his writing.
This chapter discusses the development of neorealist fiction in the twenty-first century. Two major strands of neorealism are identified and analyzed: "storytelling neorealism" and "affective neorealism." Analyzing characteristic examples... more
This chapter discusses the development of neorealist fiction in the twenty-first century. Two major strands of neorealism are identified and analyzed: "storytelling neorealism" and "affective neorealism." Analyzing characteristic examples of each type, this chapter discusses Jonathan Franzen's *The Corrections* and Sheila Heti's *How Should a Person Be?*
A chapter that offers a typology of four models of postironic literature: Motivated Postmodernism, Credulous Metafiction, the Postironic Bildungsroman, and Relational Art. A few concluding remarks on the relationship of postirony and... more
A chapter that offers a typology of four models of postironic literature: Motivated Postmodernism, Credulous Metafiction, the Postironic Bildungsroman, and Relational Art. A few concluding remarks on the relationship of postirony and neoliberalism.
An overview of the Kennedy administration's skillful use of media, fashion, and image as an instrument of governance as well as an extended analysis (and defense) of the metaphor of "Camelot" to describe the administration.
A discussion of Barack Obama's "Dreams From My Father" in relation to the critique of postmodern irony developed by members of Obama's literary generation (David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, etc.).
A review of “Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies” that links the book under review to recent developments in autofiction.
A review of "American Pulp," "Illegal Literature," and "The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction." Argues these books all reimagine the modernism/mass culture dialectic for an era after postmodernism.
Research Interests:
A review essay on Jeffrey T. Nealon's "Post-postmodernism."
A science fiction short story set in a world with National Basic Income, in which a federation of group houses tries to opt out of the labor market.
Research Interests:
Commentary on Avital Ronell scandal published in CHE.
President Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006) have received positive and extensive critical attention from both professional reviewers and University scholars. While literary intellectuals have... more
President Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006) have received positive and extensive critical attention from both professional reviewers and University scholars. While literary intellectuals have praised Obama's memoirs for the style in which he composed them, social scientists and partisan political analysts have thus far generally monopolized discussion of President Obama's writings. Yet there has been a recent surge of interest in the literary merits of Obama's writings. Our volume understands "literary" to indicate a host of a priori relationships that successful, artful writing brings to the surface of a written work. These are instantiated in narrative form, thereby revealing what Edward W. Said famously defined as the "worldliness" of the literary object. In the case of President Obama's writings, and Dreams from My Father in particular, those relationships are evident in the author's negotiation of literary tradition, rhetorical modes and historical narratives. By positioning the "literary" at this vantage, at the point where writing and the world converge, the volume's contributors assert the indispensable, and urgent, import of understanding the President not only in political terms, but, more importantly, in literary terms that place him within a long tradition of American literary-political authorship.
Research Interests: