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WCD
Web Page Starts Here
Hello. My name is William
C. Dowling. I'm a Professor of English at Rutgers University.
This page tells a little about my work and interests, and about
the courses I've taught.
As most of my students
know, I will be retiring at the end of June 2016. During my 28
years as a Rutgers professor, a course I taught every semester
was English 219, an introductory course for English majors that
focused on the close reading of poetry.
For much longer than
28 years, it was the "signature" course of the English
Department, founded by Rutgers faculty -- Richard Poirier, Thomas
Edwards, and others -- who had taught in Reuben Brower's famous
"Hum 6" course at Harvard when rigorous formal analysis
was being perfected as the necessary basis of higher-level literary
study.
A video of one of my
English 219 classes was made several years ago by Robert Andersen,
director of the films Asbury Park and Ashore. It
is now available for viewing on the Web.
Here is my personal history.
I grew up in Warner, New Hampshire,
a little town in the middle of the state. I graduated from Simonds
High School. Warner had three white churches and two covered
bridges and looked like a Currier & Ives print. When I was
away at college, all the elms on Main
Street died. Eheu!
I was an undergraduate
at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. It was a great place to
be an English major because there  was
always snow on the ground and one wanted to stay inside in Sanborn House library and read by
the fire, and because afternoon Sanborn tea was an occasion for
students and faculty to get together in a pleasantly informal
setting. At Rutgers,
Thursday Club teas at what
was formerly Toad Hall on Union Street provided a similar occasion
for over twenty years.
Students
in my 2002 course on Tolkien and Oxford Christianity  have asked that I restore the link to
"The
Temptation of Galadriel,"
a selection from one of my lectures giving a sample of the
course and its perspective. The selection may be heard by clicking
on the link above. In addition, for those who have asked why
I never felt able to offer the course a second time, here's an
exchange from my interview in The Tolkien
Review about the film that appeared several years afterwards. |
English majors in my
generation took a three-day Comprehensive Examination in the
spring of our senior year. When we signed up for the major as
first-semester sophomores, we were given a list of works and
authors for which we'd be responsible on that exam. Most of the
material was covered in our core English courses, but we all
realized at the end that the list had an independent value: it
gave us an immediate overview of the total body of knowledge
-- literary periods, authors, works, intellectual background
-- that constituted the English major. It shaped our reading,
our thinking, and our discussions with each other about literature,
during three entire years of college. At the request of some
of my Rutgers students, I several years ago reconstructed the
list for their personal use. If you'd like a copy in PDFformat
to print down, click here on Senior
Comp Reading List. Classroom teaching in English courses
was based on "close reading" of major works in English
and American literature. At Rutgers, this was the approach used
in English 219, which for many years served as the foundation
of literary study at the upper levels of the major.
I went to Harvard for
my PhD, concentrating on 18th-century English literature, early
American literature, and literary theory. My dissertation was
on three works by James Boswell -- the Tour to Corsica,
Tour to the Hebrides, and Life of Johnson -- and
the idea of the hero in the later eighteenth century. This became
my first book, The Boswellian Hero.
My latest work on American
literature is  Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine,
Theology, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,
a book about the way the revolution in French clinical teaching
shaped Oliver Wendell Holmes's later career as author of The
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table and other works. In February
2015 I gave a talk, "Boston
in the Time of Cholera," based on my more recent
research in History of Medicine.
Students who took my
seminar on Holmes and Literary Boston have asked about the church
of St. Etienne du Mont mentioned in The Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table. A picture of the interior  may be found at St. Etienne
du Mont.
My account of Holmes
and literary Boston takes as its center the classical republican
ideal of civic virtue as it shaped New England thought and writing
through the end of the nineteenth century. A work that strongly
influenced my own understanding of Boston literary culture is
Charles Eliot
Norton: The Art of Reform in Nineteenth-Century America.
Ricoeur
on Time and Narrative, my
introduction to Paul Ricoeur's three-volume philosophical work,
Temps et Recit, has recently been published by Notre Dame
University Press. A version of one chapter previously appeared
in Raritan Quarterly as "Paul Ricoeur's Poetics of
History."
Ricoeur on Time and Narrative
An Introduction
to Temps et récit
William C. Dowling
"The
scholarship in William C. Dowling's Ricoeur on Time and Narrative
is impeccable. Dowling knows Ricoeur inside out. He highlights
Ricoeur's most important arguments, presents them in a limpid,
concise language, and links them to the relevant nineteenth-
and twentieth-century philosophical developments. Dowling's book
provides us with a lucid, intelligible version of Ricoeur's major
work." — Thomas Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Professor of
French Literature, and the Committee on Social  Thought, University of Chicago
"William
C. Dowling's Ricoeur on Time and Narrative is a subtle
and remarkably well-sustained piece of work. It provides a detailed
introduction to a major work of philosophy and narrative theory—a
considerable achievement, given the difficulty of Ricoeur's text."
— Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor
of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University
"A very
good introduction. Readable, yet profound. -- Leen Verheyen
"This
is a great book that encapsulates in 140 pages what Ricoeur does
in three volumes. Accessible and clear!" -- Michael Deckard
"Dowling
is especially good at describing Ricoeur's dialectical encounters.
. . . In a short review, I cannot do justice to the many new
insights Dowling's work introduces. In addition to his own careful
reading, he also deftly examines Ricoeur's divergences from a
number of philosophers, including Kant, Aristotle, Augustine,
Husserl, and Heidegger. The main strength of the book is Dowling's
analyses of the way Ricoeur at once incorporates, yet moves beyond
the thinkers he discusses."
--Morny Joy, Religion & Literature
"Dowling
is at his best as he unfolds the significance of a third time
-- a 'narrated time'--which describes a temporality specific
to plot. Here time exists simultaneously on two levels. It includes
the time of the characters whose actions and choices unfold one
by one with unknown results, but as recounted by a narrator who
already knows the results those actions and choices will have.
. . . What Dowling delivers is an accessible and very useful
introduction to a long, difficult, and complicated
text. From this starting point, he makes it possible for students
of Ricoeur's work to take up the task of interpretation and creative
appropriation on their own."--Scott Davidson, Philosophy
in Review.
"Here
thing why that Ricoeur on Time and Narrative: An Introduction
to Temps et recit are different and reputable to be yours.
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to Temps et recit. It gives you thrill reading through journey,
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- David Stephenson, Hari Selasa
"What
do you concerning book? It is not important along? Or just adding
material when you need something to explain what the one you
have problem? How about your extra time? Or are you busy individual?
If you don't have spare time to perform others business, it is
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to Temps et récit to read."– Leticia Nielson,
Bahasa Inggris
William C.
Dowling is University Distinguished Professor of English emeritus
at Rutgers University. In literary theory, he is the author of
Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political
Unconscious and The Senses of the Text: Intensional Semantics
and Literary Theory.
AVAILABLE NOW FROM AMAZON
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My most recent work in
film studies is an essay on my favorite director, John Ford:
"John Ford's Festive Comedy: Ireland
Imagined in The Quiet Man." In Sé Merry Doyle’s prizewinning
documentary "Dreaming the Quiet Man," I can be heard developing several
points made in the essay. Doyle's documentary also features appearances
by Maureen O'Hara, Martin Scorsese, and others who share my own
view ofThe Quiet Man as a timeless masterpiece.
I try to read
as much as possible in areas I didn't have a chance to study
in college or graduate school. Recently, I was reading Jacques
Soustelle's The Aztecs on the Eve of Spanish Conquest.
I stopped reading the book when I reached a section describing
what the Aztecs, in their ignorant and backward civilization,
thought of as basic decency. I found it deeply depressing.
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Primitive Culture of the Aztecs
"No
vainglorious, presumptuous or noisy man has ever been chosen
as a dignitary; no impolite, ill-bred man, vulgar in his speaking,
impudent  in
his speech and inclined to say whatever comes into his head,
has ever sat upon the petltal or upon the icpalli.
And if it should happen that a dignitary makes unsuitable jokes
or speaks with levity, then he is called a tecucuecuehtli,
which means a buffoon. No important office of state has ever
been entrusted to a vain man, overfree in his speaking, nor to
a man that plays the fool."
--
Codex Florentia, translation from the Aztec by J. O. Anderson
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In fall semester
2013, I taught English 491, a senior seminar on the problem of
"internal" audience in art and literature. In relation
to the authors we read -- Marvell, Browning, Shakespeare, Jane
Austen, David Foster Wallace -- this was a course in the  ontology of literary works. But we also treated
the concept of "an audience posited by the work itself"
in relation to film (Branagh's version of Henry the Fifth,
Hitchcock's Strangers On a Train), art (Van Eyck, Holbein,
Hobbema, Canaletto, J.M.W. Turner, Monet, Picasso), and the music
of social protest from Woody Guthie to Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie.
The theory of audience we examined was one based on my own work
on internal audience in The Epistolary Moment and on Paul
Ricoeur's theory of narrative inTemps et récit, in which a
consciousness "emptied" of the contingent particularies
of time, place, and cultural identity is posited as the sole
medium in which any narrative is allowed to come alive as a self-contained
world. This was an extraordinary group, one of the very best
I've taught in my 25 years at Rutgers. The inset picture is a
thumbnail. Click on it to see the group in its vibrant entirety.
In fall semester 2010,
I co-taught with my colleague Myra Jehlen English
491,  a small undergraduate seminar
entitled Narratology: Style and Structure, which had its roots
in Professor Jehlen's extraordinary Five Fictions in Search
of Truth, published in 2008 by Princeton University Press
-- more particularly, in the notion of "style as epistemology"
that sustains her argument in that book -- and my own work on
Ricoeur's theory of narrative temporality. The seminar met in
Bishop House on Wednesday afternoon. It was one of the most exciting
teaching experiences of my time at Rutgers. We were all of us,
I think, sorry when it had to come to an end.
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 The Annotated Autocrat
For a set of annotations to the Riverside
edition of Oliver Wendell Holmes's The Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table, a collaborative project of English 442 -- "Oliver
Wendell Holmes and Literary Boston," Spring 2013 -- click
here on
The Annotated
Autocrat
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In my spare time, I'm also working
on Professor's
Song: A Life in Teaching,
a memoir of my career in literary studies. An early chapter entitled
Blossomberry Farm will give
account of the folk-blues scene at Dartmouth in the 1960s. I'm
also intermittently at work on an essay on the turn-of-the-century
school stories of Arthur Stanwood Pier,
about whom I've put up a Web page for other people who might
be interested in Pier's writings.
Every year, Rutgers English
majors ask me about going on for a Ph.D in English literature.
To help answer their questions, I composed a booklet on graduate
study in English for my students at Rutgers, explaining why I
think the traditional English major may be doomed to extinction
in the reasonably near future, giving newly-minted English Ph.Ds
no place to find work. Formerly, I advised students interested
in teaching English and American literature to consider going
on for the MAT. But recent developments in MAT training have
made that, too, an untenable option. You can read a revised version
of my original booklet by clicking here on Graduate
Study in English.
At Rutgers, I served
for some years as faculty advisor to the Peithessophian
Society, an undergraduate literary and debate society
whose history goes back to the early the nineteenth century.
The majority of the students I met through Peitho went on to
top law schools, medical schools, or graduate programs in such
areas as classics, philosophy, history, physics and mathematics.
It was a great privilege to oversee their progress through a
Rutgers essentially different from the one that exists today.
Peithessophian
Society
Kirkpatrick
Chapel
May 7, 2014
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A lot of my students
figure out sort of late in the day that you can't undertake the
serious study of English and American literature unless you know
Latin, which they didn't take in high school. For those who want
to learn Latin on their own, I've composed a short booklet entitled
"Learning
Latin by the Dowling Method." It tells you how to become a really competent
Latinist in a reasonably short period of time. Several generations
of my students have used the method with spectacular success.
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On
another website, WCD recently ran across an excellent guide for
faculty seeking to understand  what their students are trying to say. He is posting
it here for the benefit of colleagues across the country who
seek help with this difficult problem. Click here on
A Faculty Guide to Lykespeak
Those
with an interest in the sociolinguistic implications of their
own speech habits might also be interested at the checklist reproduced
here at
Upscale
& Downscale
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Those who grew up with
The New Yorker as edited by Mr. William Shawn, and who are trying
to adjust to the editorial practices of David Remnick and his
staff, may be interested in samples we've taken from the proofsheets
of the revised New Yorker Anthology
of Literature, which will be published early next year.
They nicely illustrate the difference in editorial styles.
Up to a few years ago,
when the program was still in existence, I directed one or two
Henry Rutgers theses per academic year. The last of these was
Ben Remsen's brilliant treatment of the problem of solipsism
in the "anti-confluential" fiction of David Foster
Wallace. A number of the students whose theses I directed pointed
out that the Rutgers Dean who supervised the program was a principal
member of the "Academic Oversight Committee" that attacked
me for criticizing commercialized Div IA sports at Rutgers. After
several faculty members wrote letters protesting that his subservience
to the Athletics Department was grossly incompatible with the
academic and intellectual values the program had always represented,
the program was abruptly abolished. It is a great loss to the
university.
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A
Reader's Companion
to
Infinite Jest
In collaboration
with Robert H. Bell of Williams College, I've written a reader's
companion to Infinite Jest, the extraordinary but superficially
"difficult" David Foster Wallace novel that has been
acclaimed as the Ulysses of the 21st century. The object
of the Companion is to provide a clear  overview of the story as a whole, allowing first-time
readers to follow Wallace's "anti-confluential" narrative
without getting lost or betwildered among its twists and turns
and dreams and displacements. As we also try to show, the "difficulty"
of Infinite Jest is crucially important to its brilliant
portrayal of lonely or isolated human consciousness in the post-modern
age.
"There
are lots of resources to assist the serious IJ reader. Mainly,
I was seeking a source that would let me keep the characters
straight, provide a dictionary of acronyms (there are about 450
sort-of-recognized slash known and totally-fabricated acronyms
underlying the narration like a grid upon which a foundation
is poured) and a plot outline. With Bell and Dowling at my side
I set sail upon the deep waters of Infinite Jest. (I should
mention too, Bell and Dowling were indispensable at the beginning
of the effort. As the themes developed, the characters fleshed
out and the style absorbed, their guide made it possible to go
on alone.)"
--Doug
Bruns, Mostly Fiction Book Reviews
"This
is the first book I'd recommend to a first-time reader of Wallace's
masterpiece. The first half consists of mini-essays on the novel's
structure, time scheme, characters, settings, etc., followed
by a 50-page plot summary (broken down by scene), a 60-page census
of all the people (real and fictitious) mentioned in the book,
and glossaries of the novel's acronyms and slang terms."
--
Steven Moore, Amazon
A wonderfully
clear, helpful, well written companion guide to reading David
Foster Wallace's epic Infinite Jest. It helps with keeping
track of his fiendishly complicated plot, themes, acronyms (which
abound) and characters.
--
Marcia LaVive, Amazon
"Om du
kommenterar och länkar den här artikeln, så kommer
det inlägget att länkas till härifrån!"
--Twingly
bloggsök
We're happy
to report that the Reader's Companion is now once again
available from Amazon:
Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest
In the meantime,
those who would like a brief "look inside" may click
on the link:
Reader's
Companion: Introduction
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At Rutgers, I try to
teach regularly in all the areas in which I do research. In English
literature, I have taught courses in 18th-century poetry and
seminars on Samuel Johnson and Boswell & Johnson. In American
literature, I teach both the first half of the American survey
-- "American Literature from the Puritans to the Civil War"
-- and English 352:315: "American Literature to 1800."
In literary theory, I have taught senior seminars in Theory of
Audience and the New Historicism. I also used to English 220
every other term. (For one of my 220 classes, I put up on the
web a short note entitled "Who's
the Narrator of Pale Fire." I'm leaving it up now
for those interested in Nabokov.) Another page I wrote for one
of my classes is "The Gradesavers'
Prufrock," which comments on a bit of work done
by an online termpaper service professedly staffed by "Harvard-educated"
individuals.
I teach English 219 every
semester. For my English 219 students, I produced a handout on
how to use the Oxford English Dictionary when reading literary
works written in earlier periods. I've been asked to leave the
handout
"How
to Use the OED" up
on my site for people who want to print copies. It is herewith
left up. For my 219 students, I've also posted on my site a short
excurus on Wordsworth's Upon Westminster
Bridge, to illustrate a point about the "biographical
fallacy" that very often comes up with that poem.
In spring 1999, the intellectual
intrepidity of Rutgers English majors was memorably demonstrated
when over 120 students signed up for 18th-Century Poetry, a course
that covered not only standard authors like Dryden and Pope and
Johnson but "difficult" poems like Dyer's The Ruins
of Rome and Cowper's The Task. They were a heroic and wonderful
group.
This is only part of
the class. We had planned to have our picture taken by the memorial
marking the spot where, when Rutgers was still Queen's College,
Alexander Hamilton's artillery company covered Washington's retreat
to Trenton, but there were too many cars in the huge parking
lot that the Rutgers administration has installed around the
Hamilton memorial, so we moved locations and some students got
left out.
 The class in the picture was
also the latest to hear the never-ending saga of WCD, his friend
Robert H. Bell, and Stephen Duck, the Thresher Poet. If you would
like to meet RHB, click here on The Steven
Duck Legacy. Another old friend about whom my students
have heard me tell stories is John Gordon, the great James Joyce
scholar who has recently and unexpectedly altered course and
written the most original study of Charles Dickens published
in the last 30 years. For my students' sake, I've often wished
that he was on our English faculty here at Rutgers. To hear the
inimitable Gordon voice, click here on his Conn
College Convocation address. To read Professor Gordon's
memorable statement on the behavior of Connecticut College faculty
during the lamentable "Pessin affair," click on
Vox Clamantis: "l'affaire
Pessin" at Connecticut College. In connection with
the Pessin affair, and with the episodes like it that one hears
about every week these days, I also wanted to put up my own response
to a similar episode at another institution. It's entitled Where Did Free Speech Go to Die?
Another of the courses
I've most enjoyed teaching at Rutgers was a New Historicism seminar
taught in the Fall semester of 1995. Here is a picture of me
with the members of the seminar.  We
are all looking serious because we had spent two weeks on the
concept of "structural causality" in Althusserian Marxism
and didn't seem to be getting anywhere. Right after this picture
was taken we had a breakthrough, so if the photographer had shown
up three days later we would all be smiling.
Another wonderful course
was the Mirror of Enlightenment, jointly offered in Fall 1996
by the English department and the Comparative Literature program.
This was a seminar in which we studied the relations between
French and English thought and politics in the 18th century,
and in which every assignment had readings in English and French.
Here I am with members of the seminar. We are standing in front
of the statue of William the Silent in the old quad .
(You can see a larger picture of the seminar with their bronze
friend by clicking here on William the
Silent.)
This group is a great
example of why so many faculty consider it a privilege to teach
at Rutgers. Look carefully at the picture. It appears, does it
not, to be a group of normal, happy, delightful American
university students? And it is, partly. Happy they were, most
days. Delightful they were, tous les jours. Normal they were
not. Every student in the picture was able to go home at night
and read an hour of Locke in English, then two hours of Montesquieu
in French, an hour of Swift or Gibbon in English, then an hour
or two of Voltaire or Rousseau or Diderot in French.
And this they did, night after night, week after week, until
we had covered the Enlightenment from Locke and Newton to the
French Revolution. It was, in its way, heroic. (If you look
carefully at the New Historicism seminar and the Mirror of Enlightenment
picture, you will see that two students, Rob Young and John Davies,
are present in both. Old men forget, and all shall be forgot,
but they'll remember with advantages what deeds we did those
days.)
I hope eventually to
teach several other seminars in two languages (English and Latin,
English and German), so I am leaving the original Mirror of Enlightenment
course description in place as a sort of prototype. If you
have friends who are Classics majors or German majors who
might want to take such a seminar -- or who are English majors
able to read Latin or German at an advanced level of competence
-- tell them to come to this page and click here on Mirror
of Enlightenment. They should get in touch with me if
they would be interested in a similar course in their language.
In spring semester 2002
I taught a Rutgers General Honors seminar entitled "The
Face of Battle," focusing on the way individuals and cultures
try to come to terms with combat as an "unrepresentable"
experience -- pain, death, screams, confusion, agony -- through
the imposition of narrative structure: stories about heroism
and suffering and honor and national purpose. The course took
as its center  the work of the great military
historian John Keegan -- author of The Face of Battle, The Mask
of Command, The Price of Admiralty, and other works -- and we
also read Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers, Alvin Kernan's
Crossing the Line, Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth, as well as
viewing Kenneth Branaugh's film version of Henry the Fifth and
Stephen Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. A high point was the
session we spent with Commander Charles
Standard, a Helldiver -- dive bomber -- pilot who won
the Navy Cross for extraordinary bravery in the Battle of the
Philippine Sea. His visit came immediately after we had read
Kernan's Crossing the Line, with its first-hand account of the
carrier war in the Pacific. We found it a rare and moving experience
to have the chance to talk for three hours with a carrier pilot
who had actually lived through the events we had been discussing.
It was, as one member of the seminar said, like having someone
walk into the seminar room straight out of the pages of history.
The picture above shows the class with Commander Standard on
the day of his visit.
I taught the same course
in Spring 2004
as my farewell to the Honors Program, having notified the director
that I would not be available to teach seminars again until Rutgers
began to devote the same amount of resources to its best and
brightest students that it has been devoting over the last 10
years to a handful of hired athletes on the basketball and football
teams. The splendid group with whom I spent my farewell semester
is pictured at right.
My last work devoted
entirely to eighteenth-century literature was on the English
verse epistle. This is the subject of my book The Epistolary
Moment, which is also about the concept of "internal audience"
in literature. In early American literature, I subsequently concentrated
on literary Federalism. Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary
Connecticut is about the Connecticut Wits,
a group of poets who thought of their poetry as a form of "symbolic
action" that could change the course of history. It was
followed by Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson, which
is about the literary opposition to Thomas Jefferson and "American
jacobinism," has just been published.
In literary theory, my
best-known book is Jameson, Althusser, Marx, an introduction
to Althusserian Marxism and the work of the American theorist
Fredric Jameson. It has been translated into a number of languages,
including Chinese and Korean. I keep a copy of the Korean translation
in my office so that Sean Yoon and Alicia Kim and my other Korean
students can read it and tell me what I said. I am a member of
the Twin Oaks Theory Seminar,  at which I deliverd "The
Gender Fallacy." In published form, it appears in
Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Daphe Pata
and Will H. Corral (Columbia University Press, 2005).
My next work in literary
theory, The
Senses of the Text, concerned the relations between semantic
theory and the problem of determinate meaning in literature.
It concentrates on Chomskyan linguistics and the work of Jerrold
J. Katz (The Metaphysics of  Meaning) in
philosophy of language. Some of my influences in literary theory
may be found on my Saints & Heroes page.
Since I've received many
requests for offprints of my article "Scholarly
Publishing in the Age of Oprah," I asked permission
from The Journal of Scholarly Publishing to post a copy here
on my Web site. I have also posted "Manfred
Mickleson Applies for an 18th-century Job," a letter
that I found in my files from an 18th-century search run by my
department some years ago. Another letter I've found in my files
concerned hiring in the Rutgers English Department over a decade
ago. If you'd like to read it, click here on Rutgers
English Then and Now. More recently, after reading about
the controversy at surrounding Cornel West's departure from Harvard,
I did a bit of research on earlier members of the Harvard faculty
who combined a career in popular music with eminence as teachers
and scholars. By way of providing context for the West episode,
I'm making available to the general public an excerpt from Doo Wop Days: the Inside Story of 50s Rock
'n' Roll, a little-known book I was lucky enough to run
across in the used bin at Micawber's.
Several years ago, in
PMLA, Professor Wendell Harris predicted that over the next 10-20
years, most English departments will either become departments
of Cultural Studies or divide into separate Departments of Cultural
Studies and Departments of English. Since this seems to me a
prediction with important implications for Rutgers, I've put
up a page on "Literature &
Cultural Studies" that tries to visualize its possible
consequences. On a related note, Chip Szalkorski recently sent
me a copy of "Ideology in the
Classroom," which addresses some of the same issues.
In recent years, I have
done a good bit of research on standardized testing and college
admissions, in preparation for an essay about American democracy
and the "consumer model of education." My most recent
substantial article on educational policy was "Why
America Needs the SAT," published in Academic Questions
in Winter, 1999.
I am proud of my membership
in the Drake Group, which was founded at the Drake Conference
on College Sports Corruption, a historic national meeting on
ways to save universities from being swallowed up by the TV-revenue-driven
behemoth of professionalized college sports. n response to requests
from Drake Group members, I've put up a copy of my review-essay
"Big Time Sports as Academic Prostitution,"
originally published in the journal Academic Questions, and "Sports and Ressentiment: Why the Boosters
Run Ohio State," which appeared in Social Science
and Modern Society.
Another educational policy
issue that concerns me is teaching evaluation forms, which I
regard as "customer satisfaction surveys" that encourage
students to adopt a "consumer model" of education.
To understand why I see the commodity model as the single biggest
danger to genuine education in America read my Targum op-ed column
"Why We Should Abolish Teaching
Evaluations." Another short guide I've composed
on the "consumer model"is posted on my web site. Click
here for "5 Ways to Tell If You Go
to a Third-Rate University." In response to vicious attacks
on Dartmouth President James O. Freedman -- a great man, whose
untimely death in 2006 left everyone who cares about the school
deeply saddened --for having attempted to raise the level ofintellectual
seriousness on campus, I wrote an op ed in The Dartmouth suggesting a
number of changes. They have not, one is sorry to report, yet
been adopted.
 O'Brian's World
back in print
Thomas R. Edwards'
great reader's companion to the Aubrey-Maturin novels is now
once again in print.
Order a copy online
For
a look inside, click here on
"Look
Inside"
|
Some of my students think
it's pretty funny that I detest the constant interjection of
"like" into sentences uttered by undergraduates, and
that I annually give out a Likosaurus Award to those who make
the greatest progress in their battle against Lykelyke
Syndrome. Michael Sun drew this caricature of me reacting
to a bad "like day" in class. He thought it was pretty
funny. (He did not laugh so hard when he found out what he
got for a course grade, ho ho.)
Another student, Tim
Steffens, thought it was funny that I loathe and detest television
and keep telling my students to smash their TV sets and fill
their rooms with books. (I actually do think that the people
in Hell watch TV. Also that people who watch TV here on earth
-- instead of reading books and learning Greek and arguing with
their friends about Aristotle or Milton or Tocqueville -- are
in Hell and simply haven't realized it yet.) I've put Tim's caricature of me exhorting a
class to throw out their TV sets on a separate page, so that
you can see how funny he thought he was being. (Tim was taking
18th-century poetry. He flunked the course.) Last of all, some
students think it's funny that I keep telling them that students
who misspell words and won't learn the elementary rules of English
punctuation are doomed to be total failures in life, no matter
how admirable they may be in other respects. I've put the "No Bull" exhortation that
I hand out to my classes up along with Michael and Tim's caricatures.
Some personal notes.
My wife and I recently moved to Reading, Pennsylvania. For over
twenty years, my favorite pastime outside of reading and studying
languages was training for marathons. Until I got injured I ran
the Marine Corps Marathon every fall and the Vermont City Marathon
in Burlington, Vermont every spring. For a picture of me
in marathon trim, with my amazing mother Lillian Dowling and
my younger brother John, click here on Vermont
City Marathon. My favorite contemporary writers are Patrick
O'Brian and Elmore Leonard. My favorite "personal"
writer is Parson Woodforde, an 18th-century Norfolk clergyman
who kept a five-volume diary covering most of his adult life.
I also play blues guitar -- my heroes are Hubert Sumlin and Mance
Lipscomb -- and listen to jazz (Miles Davis, Bill Evans) and
classical music (Vivaldi, Corelli, Handel, Mozart). Another of
my musical enthusiasms is gospel, and here at Rutgers, I
am a fan of the Liberated Gospel Choir.
(For the story of how my students have been expanding my
musical and cultural horizons, click here on Jerry
Garcia). Those who would like to read "Ripple:
A Minor Excursus" may do so by clicking on the foregoing
link.
With Mrs. D, I spend
part of every year in Paris. A few years ago, I began doing restaurant
reviews for the guide Bon Sejour. For a review of my favorite
Paris restaurant, click here on Le Refuge
du Passe.
 During the Vietnam war, I was one of the
principal organizers of the New England
Resistance, whose role in breaking the will of the Johnson
administration has, until recently, never been given its due
by historians (mainly because the story of the antiwar movement
has relied on the accounts of those who spent the Vietnam period
hiding out behind student deferments or Peace Corps exemptions
or other Bill Clinton-type dodges for "opposing" the
war while remaining perfectly safe). Now the story has been told
in Michael Foley's book Confronting the War Machine. It will
make a lot of so-called tenured radicals unhappy, but it is going
to have a marked effect on the way future generations understand
the anti-Vietnam War movement.
|
Rutgers athletic director "Bob" Mulcahy launched a
contemptible charge of "racism" at a remark I'd made
in a New York Times story. The charge was echoed by Rutgers
president "Dick" McCormick. Both tried, falsely, to
assert that my comment had been made about Rutgers athletes.
For an abridged version of an op ed that spells out the actual
context of my remark, click here on 
Those interested
in the long-term effect on Rutgers of 25 years of commercialized
athletics may also be interested in
36 Harriet Drive
English 219 at Rutgers