Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction

by Lee Konstantinou

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."

Genres: Literary Criticism

384 pages, Hardcover

Published March 7, 2016

About the author

I've written fiction, criticism, and reviews.

- I wrote the novel Pop Apocalypse (Ecco/HarperPerennial, 2009).

- With Samuel Cohen, I co-edited The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (University of Iowa Press, 2012).

- Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction was published in 2016 by Harvard University Press.

- The Last Samurai Reread came out from the Rereadings series at Columbia University Press in 2022.

- I co-edited with Georgiana Banita a collection called Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman (2023) with the University Press of Mississippi.

I'm working on a new project called “Creator-Owned Comics" which is about the ideal and practice of creator-ownership in the comics world in the 1980s and 1990s.

Reviews

[Brett Fujioka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic read. Book convinced me that the politics of David Foster Wallace (Post-Irony), his predecessors, and successors were politically relevant. In this way, it helped understand why the rhetoric of both offline and online Millenial subcultures shifted from Cynicism and Irony to conviction.

[E. C. Koch · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a period of time during the Cold War when a bunch of second-string scientists were hanging out in their university labs, bored, waiting for their more famous bosses to come home from the Manhattan Project, who, to assuage their boredom, invented a bunch of elements. By shooting uranium with an electron-emitting ray-gun, Glenn Seaborg and Albert Ghiorso “discovered” berkelium and californium and mendelevium, these (relatively) enormous atoms that were super unstable and existed for, like, nanoseconds before deteriorating into more stable elements. Predictably, this started a race among universities for who could get the next one, and by so doing cement that university’s (or scientist’s) legacy by winning the right to name that element. The aspect of that race – a bunch of university-affiliated brains trying to outpace and outmaneuver one another in order to define one small, but sexy, part of a very large field – puts me in mind of the current race in English over who will “discover” the true identity of post-postmodernism. And like the science race too, the popomo race means shooting our guns at an unstable, radioactive element: irony. Irony is basically impossible to write about because it won’t hold still. As soon as we’re sure that it’s just a utilitarian trope, it becomes a discursive mode. As soon as we’re sure that it’s a discursive mode, it becomes a rebellious attitude. As soon as we’re sure that it’s a rebellious attitude, it becomes a marketing strategy. And so, because of its protean nature, defining irony, let alone defining a period based on its attitudinal relationship to irony, is a totally fraught enterprise, and, in this way, irony, like anything else radioactive, will kill you. Lee Konstantinou (who I understand walks around Maryland wearing one of those lead-lined dentist smocks) is, nonetheless, undaunted, and, in Cool Characters, pulls off a tough trick. Rather than trying to parse how succeeding generations of authors have related to irony by unpacking the use of irony in their fiction (which will kill you), or attempt to show how irony in fiction has changed its character from playful to political to exhausted (which will kill you), Konstantinou expands on four real-world character types (the hipster, the punk, the believer, and the coolhunter) who convey in their behavior the moment’s attitude toward irony. By classifying these characters, Konstantinou is then able to dig into the literature and make his larger argument without sustained exposure to radioactivity. And that larger argument is the work of defining this brave new period, which for Konstantinou means orienting our understanding of contemporary literature around his term “postirony.” Becoming postironic, the argument goes, means passing through ironic postmodernity and coming out the other side having learned to recognize its curious power to criticize and undermine without conflating symbolic resistance with meaningful political action. This methodology is what makes Konstantinou’s postirony model so robust, for rather than cleaving aesthetics from materialism and treating them as though they’re separate, he weaves materialist criticism into his aesthetic framework, allowing for readings that include commentary on neoliberalism and marketing, the two poles of the Death Star that Jameson and company have been facing down for decades now. So postirony is a kind of grand unifying theory for literary criticism. Too, Konstantinou, the first person I’ve seen do this in print, engages with the New Sincerity, saying that, of all the arguments for what to call the period following postmodernism, postirony is closest in spirit to the New Sincerity, but that the New Sincerity is flawed for how narrow its purview is. As a proponent of the New Sincerity myself, this rankles, and, having now read the book, I see his point. The stuff here on the punk and “positive dystopia” was flummoxing, and, because of my personal interests, I wanted a lot more on the believer, but in permeating the reality-fiction barrier and accounting for contemporary fiction’s disparate branches, Konstantinou has in postirony a solid theory and in Cool Characters a solid book.

[Brian Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting discussion of the shifting attitudes to irony and cool. Particularly found the discussion of Temporary Autonomous Zones, punk and Occupy really thought provoking. Personally, I've always hated earnestness because it's the pose that tries to deny it's a pose, but maybe I've read too much Wilde!