Currently a professor of English at the University of Louisville, I teach and publish on a wide range of literature, most often British Literature from Shakespeare to the Romantics along with contemporary Theory.
As a theorist, my biggest influences are my teachers, Stanley Fish and Fred Jameson. As a writer of creative nonfiction, I would name Norman McLean, Robert Pirsig, Ernest Hemingway and Herman Melville.
Favorite Books
Today's desert island list: Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantics--esp Keats and Coleridge, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Hart Crane, Berryman, Lowell, Tom Sleigh. Theorists: Jameson's Political Unconscious, Lacan's Ecrits, Stanley Fish's essays, all Freud, Marx's Grundrisse, Barthes, Foucault, Zizek, Zupancic. Novelists: Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald's Stories and The Crack Up, Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, Singer's Enemies: A Love Story, Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Roth's The Ghostwriter.
Favorite Authors
See above
What I'm Reading
I am teaching two courses this fall: Shakespeare and British Literature 1600-1800. I am also reading books edited by Luke Dempsey, editor of Hudson St Press, and the editor of my memoir Big Sid's Vincati.
The astrologer Simon Forman went to the Globe on Saturday April 10th, 1611 and later wrote about it in his diary. Although it is tempting to paste in the entire account, I am going to drop it in
A crib on what to look for when you watch Hamlet. Remarks given during a roundtable prior to a performance of Hamlet (directed by Rinda Frye) at the University of Louisville (11/2/08).
Belle Yang drew my attention to Fish’s recent post over at the NYT where he wrote in support of current policy that forbids educators from wearing political campaign buttons while teaching:
On Thursday, I walked across the University of Louisville campus, reviewing what I would say about John Milton when I noticed that it was raining. Just a few drops. I looked up and the sky seemed
In an earlier RR blog, I argued that the latter part of the twentieth century will go down in literary history as the AGE OF THEORY. The specific dates I picked I also stand behind: May 1968 to S
To get in the mood for my hastily arranged head shot photo shoot, I rode my Vincent Black Shadow over to Quadrant Studios (located across the Ohio River in Indiana).
It was a freak wind event: somehow Hurricane Ike unleashed some sort of trap door that let 75 mph winds drop out of the upper atmosphere and rake the Ohio River valley. There was no rain, the sky, a
Inspired by Blair Kilpatrick’s gift of a Sauce Piquante CD, I made a pilgrimage to Boston to see Paul Weller play live at the Berklee Theater (on 9/9/08). I went with one of my best friends fro
“In fact, apart from certain singular situations–that is, apart from the unremitting efforts of those who make thought, including political thought live—there is nothing apart from the Americ
The reading had been empty and in truth, I was thrilled. I was excited to meet Pinsky and to see Tom again. I had studied with Sleigh when I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth.
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