Lee Konstantinou

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Lee Konstantinou Biography

Lee Konstantinou is one of the most popular and richest Novelist who was born on December 29, 1978 in New York City, New York City, ****. As of June 1, 2023, Lee has a net worth approximately $5 Million. In his 2016 book, Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction, Konstantinou expands on the idea of postironic literature. The book first details the “political history of irony” in American fiction, which Konstantinou contends “Wallace misread” as having an “unambiguously critical mission at midcentury,” instead offering that “irony offered a vision of political freedom troublingly imbricated with Cold War liberalism.” In the introduction, Konstantinou examines the character of irony, first noting the ambivalence of postmodern authors such as Wallace or Zadie Smith about irony and other features of postmodernism. He contends that the most important goal for writers seeking to move beyond postmodernism is transcending irony, though these writers don’t have any illusions about returning to a pre-postmodern world. He details four types of political irony: the cognitive, the antifoundational, the historicist, and the characterological. The cognitive form of political irony “sees its political power as arising from its status as a speech act.” In Konstantinou’s view, the characterological form of irony is the most effective. He contends that the debate over the use and history of irony is characterological, as “[w]hether they are concerned with irony’s cognitive, epistemic, or historical dimensions, those who argue about irony use a rich language of character, attitude, sensibility, disposition, and ethos” Konstantinou also discusses the movement of New Sincerity in his introduction, arguing that it is “closest in spirit to postirony,” but its “focus on sincerity too narrowly maps the contemporary literary field[….]Why, after all, would sincerity be the aspired state one might want to attain if one was concerned about irony? Why not commitment, or passion, or emotion, or decision?” He also notes, “[m]ore importantly, [Adam] Kelly’s focus on the ‘ethical’ accounts for only a narrow sector of contemporary efforts to move beyond the postmodern,” as movements beyond postmodernism should not only address “questions of traditional ethical or moral concern but also a broader universe of mental training, including political life, of which the ethical aspiration to sincerity is indeed one important dimension”

Konstantinou examines figures of American life, the hipster and the punk, and their relation to irony. He contends that “by studying the hipster, the Ur- ironist of postwar life – a character type many artists and intellectuals thought was best adapted to the age of abundance – we can reconstruct the foundations of our contemporary picture of irony and, in doing so, revise many deeply ingrained assumptions about its subversive power” He then traces the concept of “hipness” through American history, beginning in 1938 with Cab Calloway and jive and moving through authors such as Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon. Konstantinou concludes the chapter by contending that “the quest for hip became a branch of a more general postwar quest for criticality as such, which was neither at odds with the liberal ‘status quo’ nor just another form of positivism[…]Hipness became a characterological weapon in an intellectual conflict that pitted increasingly stale critical institutions against newer forms of knowingness, newer places outside of society that were, simultaneously, inside emerging subcultural groups or coteries that claimed to occupy advantageous epistemic vantage points on American life. We must conclude that the hipster – who signaled his exclusive knowledge through irony – lived in accord with the dominant spirit of the Age of Criticism” In his next chapter, “Punk’s Positive Dystopia,” he labels the punk in the 1970s as a “frustrated agent within the specific contradictions that marked the boundary between the midcentury welfare state[…]and a still-inchoate (at least at the level of public policy) neoliberalism” Konstantinou notes that the punk sought Do it yourself or DIY culture as a solution to the era in which they existed. He contends that the punk’s use of irony, seen in works by authors such as William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, is “positive dystopia,” an “ironic narrative mode that finds the conditions for survival in destruction” He differentiates the punk from the hipster, noting, “Punk escalates the critical irony of the hipster. Whereas the hipster used irony to draw attention to the polysemy of language, to manipulate language in pursuit of what he saw as human freedom, the punk uses linguistic polysemy in an effort to stop or arrest language itself.” Konstantinou then examines punk’s connection to irony through its resistance to “selling out” and how this resistance became co- opted, Burroughs’ writing, and contemporary punk and its usage of “temporary autonomous zones” or TAZs.

Konstantinou wrote Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire, which was published in 2009 by Ecco/Harper Perennial. The novel details a future in which “California is an occupied territory, the United Nations is for poor countries, and America’s president is named Friendly, but the media-obsessed, personal- computer-equipped denizens[…] are blissfully unconcerned about the brink of armageddon.”

In 2012, Konstantinou co-edited The Legacy of David Foster Wallace with University of Missouri professor Samuel Cohen. The collection discusses American author David Foster Wallace’s legacy following his death in 2008 and includes pieces by other American writers such as Don DeLillo, George Saunders, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen as well as other figures in Wallace’s life, such as his editor, Michael Pietsch. The collection also includes a chapter by Konstantinou, titled “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief,” which would later be included in Konstantinou’s 2016 book Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction. In the piece, Konstantinou discusses Wallace’s fiction, especially his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, his 1993 essay, “E Pluribus Unum,” and Wallace’s desire for “a viable postironic ethos for U.S. literature and culture at the End of History”

Lee Konstantinou Net Worth

Lee is one of the richest Novelist from . According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Lee Konstantinou 's net worth $5 Million.

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Facts & Trivia

Lee Ranked on the list of most popular Novelist. Also ranked in the elit list of famous people born in. Lee Konstantinou celebrates birthday on December 29 of every year.