What are you currently reading?
- Generation A, Douglas Coupland
- Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (re-reading), Graham Harman
- The Inner History of Devices, Sherry Turkle
- Anything at all by Nick Rombes (http://ephraimpnoble.blogspot.com/2009/10/project.html)
- Various online bicycle repair and maintenance manuals
- Various articles on Terror Management Theory
What are your five favourite texts?
- The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (facsimile edition), William Blake
- The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker
- Barthes by Barthes, Roland Barthes
- A Confederacy of Dunces, John Henry Toole
- L'Etranger, Albert Camus
What are the top five texts that you find to be the most useful for teaching?
I generally create a course pack of readings for my students based on specific themes. But there are some texts that come up frequently:
- The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake
- On the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke
- The Medium is the Massage (yes, mAssage), Marshall McLuhan
- The New Media Reader
- The Little, Brown Handbook
What texts have you had the most fun researching?
I would have to say the "texts" of William Blake, including his notebooks, paintings, sketches, marginalia and of course imagetexts. Blake's generative combinations of image and text challenge us to move beyond conventional approaches to literary criticism, and to invent our own research methods. Blake's visionary style is an infinite source of surprise and inspiration. "Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius."
What would you be if you weren't an English professor?
A tyger, a tick, a pebble, a clod of clay, a fixed-gear bicycle, a 4-band 1k ohm resistor, or any other unknowable but imaginable entity.