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Ken Hirschkop

What are you currently reading?

Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust, Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and the Language of Man" (for about the eight millionth time, because I still don't know what he's on about), the London Review of Books (fairly constantly), Mark Osbaldeston, Unbuilt Toronto

What are your five favourite texts?

Fiction: Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita; Imre Kertesz, Fatelessness; Nikolai Gogol, "The Overcoat"; Shakespeare, King Lear; James Joyce, Ulysses

Criticism/Theory/History: Roland Barthes, Mythologies; Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope; Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia; Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing; Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology

What are the top five texts that you find to be the most useful for teaching?

What texts have you had the most fun researching?

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project: I read this together with three friends. Then we wrote a book about it, which was just about the most enjoyable thing I've done since becoming an academic. We met every month, sometimes in the evening to drink and talk, sometimes over lunch. We went to Paris for research; we went to Wales to edit the thing. What's not to like?

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course In General Linguistics: Great fun, because Saussure didn't write it (it was put together by his students from various notes), and trying to figure out what it might have looked like if he had is a wonderful puzzle.

Grigory Vinokur, The Culture of Language: it's an attempt from 1925 to create a radical linguistics, written by one of the foremost linguists in the then Soviet Union. Very clever, very much of its time, a fantastic instance of a scientific work that is locked into a particular historical moment.

Wittgenstein: well, there are no texts, really (except the Tractatus), just endless notes endlessly rewrittten, and that is what makes it so much fun to research.

What would you be if you weren't an English professor?

Probably an unemployed English professor. But two things I might have been if I hadn't decided to do things this way are a harpsichord maker (I was an apprentice for a while) and a political organiser (which took up a good portion of my 1970s).