Lee Konstantinou
In the latest Adbusters, Douglas Haddow gives us his takedown of modern-day hipsters, a popular activity in hip glossy magazines and journals of opinion. It may be unfair to critique this article, which doesn’t pretend to be a profound explication on the origins and meaning of hipsterdom, but stuff like this irritates me. The reasoning … Continue reading Hipsters at the End of the World
I have some good news to share with my adoring reading public (about 2 to 5 of you a day, if Google Analytics is to be believed). My essay on William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and branding theory, drawn from the trendspotter chapter of my dissertation, has been accepted for publication by a big cultural studies/theory … Continue reading Some good news
In the WSJ, James Seaton reviews Praising It New, an anthology of writing by the New Critics, edited by Garrick Davis. In the space of a short review, Seaton–quite remarkably–manages to blame all of the following for our corrupt contemporary literature-hating ways: Television shows, movies, instant-messaging, Facebook, blogs, “writers with literary pretensions” who are “now … Continue reading The Old New Criticism, New Again
In the hallowed halls of literary study, there is a hugely popular critical genre best described as “Endism,” a kind of writing which continually proclaims the pending doom of English Departments, attributes said pending doom to our embrace of corrupt Theory, and then offers methodological–rather than institutional–solutions for the problems that plague our disciplinary soul. … Continue reading Endism, Literary Darwinism
Friends, Romans, Blogosphereomen (and -women): I hereby announce the opening for business of http://leekonstantinou.com. Begin thy rejoicing. Begin, I say! Continue reading Hello, Please Give Me Some Fish
To prep for the next diss. chapter, on the figure of the "believer," I’ve been reading lots of lit crit on metafiction and, in an unrelated line of reading, have been simultaneously perusing Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, a terrific book on economic development that blows neo-liberal free-market orthodoxies more or less out of the political-economic … Continue reading Metafiction as R&D
To prep for the next diss. chapter, on the figure of the "believer," I’ve been reading lots of lit crit on metafiction and, in an unrelated line of reading, have been simultaneously perusing Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, a terrific book on economic development that blows neo-liberal free-market orthodoxies more or less out of the political-economic … Continue reading Metafiction as R&D
I haven’t written anything for this blog in a long while, largely because I’ve been in the US, partly out of laziness. I am writing from Singapore now, where I am teaching yet another EPGY course in creative writing. I was also in Singapore this past May, teaching yet another class. There isn’t much to … Continue reading Singapore 3.0
Well, for instance: …if you really do have a chronic problem with typos and off-seeming sentences in early drafts of your writing. Since I turned in my hipster chapter, I’ve been going over it again and again, finding (what seem to me) terrible typos and clunker phrases. At one point, I accidentally used of the … Continue reading You’re not really suffering from OCD if…
Well, for instance: …if you really do have a chronic problem with typos and off-seeming sentences in early drafts of your writing. Since I turned in my hipster chapter, I’ve been going over it again and again, finding (what seem to me) terrible typos and clunker phrases. At one point, I accidentally used of the … Continue reading You’re not really suffering from OCD if…