Lee Konstantinou
Lee Konstantinou is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He studies twentieth and twenty-first century American fiction, postmodernist art and thought, comics, science fiction, and popular culture, as well as literary and cultural sociology.
He recently published "Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction" (Harvard University Press), a literary history of irony in the U.S. since 1945. This project tells the story of the rise of an oppositional ethos of irony, the incorporation of irony into mainstream media and political culture, and the development of an alternative “postironic” sensibility. Dominant debates about irony, this book argues, have treated irony not only as a trope but also as an ethos: that is, as a way of life, an attitude, or a total orientation toward the world. Each chapter therefore analyzes an important postwar characterological model that has a significant relationship to irony: the hipster, the punk, the believer, the coolhunter, and the occupier. "Cool Characters" offers original interpretations of major works by authors including Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Jennifer Egan, Michael Muhammed Knight, William Gibson, Jonathan Lethem, and Rachel Kushner.
He co-edited "The Legacy of David Foster Wallace" (University of Iowa Press) with Samuel Cohen. He wrote the novel "Pop Apocalypse" (Ecco/HarperCollins) and contributed a short story, "Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA," to "Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future" (HarperCollins). He has published essays, chapters, and reviews in a range of journals and collections, and is a Humanities editor with the "Los Angeles Review of Books."
He is currently working on a history of comics called "The Cartoon Art: Comics in the Age of Mass High Culture" and a short monograph on Helen DeWitt's novel "The Last Samurai" for Columbia University Press's ReReadings series. He is also co-editing (with Georgiana Banita) a collection of essays on the comics of Art Spiegelman for the University Press of Mississippi.
He recently published "Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction" (Harvard University Press), a literary history of irony in the U.S. since 1945. This project tells the story of the rise of an oppositional ethos of irony, the incorporation of irony into mainstream media and political culture, and the development of an alternative “postironic” sensibility. Dominant debates about irony, this book argues, have treated irony not only as a trope but also as an ethos: that is, as a way of life, an attitude, or a total orientation toward the world. Each chapter therefore analyzes an important postwar characterological model that has a significant relationship to irony: the hipster, the punk, the believer, the coolhunter, and the occupier. "Cool Characters" offers original interpretations of major works by authors including Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Jennifer Egan, Michael Muhammed Knight, William Gibson, Jonathan Lethem, and Rachel Kushner.
He co-edited "The Legacy of David Foster Wallace" (University of Iowa Press) with Samuel Cohen. He wrote the novel "Pop Apocalypse" (Ecco/HarperCollins) and contributed a short story, "Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA," to "Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future" (HarperCollins). He has published essays, chapters, and reviews in a range of journals and collections, and is a Humanities editor with the "Los Angeles Review of Books."
He is currently working on a history of comics called "The Cartoon Art: Comics in the Age of Mass High Culture" and a short monograph on Helen DeWitt's novel "The Last Samurai" for Columbia University Press's ReReadings series. He is also co-editing (with Georgiana Banita) a collection of essays on the comics of Art Spiegelman for the University Press of Mississippi.
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Books by Lee Konstantinou
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.
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.""
Articles by Lee Konstantinou
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."""
Chapters by Lee Konstantinou
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.
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.""
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."""