What are you currently reading?
Permanence and Change, by Kenneth Burke. It's full of his usual brilliance, but it was written at the height of the Great Depression and his fulminations about capitalist economic imperatives ring especially clearly after our own financial meltdown.
What are your five favourite texts?
- Annals of the Former World, John McPhee
- The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the original BBC radio series), Douglas Adams
- Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
- The Rhetoric of Irony, Wayne Booth
- De Officiis, Marcus Tullius Cicero
What are the top five texts that you find to be the most useful for teaching?
- "The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric," Richard Weaver
- "Reflections on Race and Sex," bell hooks
- On Christian Doctrine, Augustine of Hippo
- "The Cairo Address," Barrack Obama
- The Rhetoric, Aristotle
What texts have you had the most fun researching?
- Noam Chomsky's review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour; Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Against Method (editions 1, 2, & 3), Paul Feyerabend
- Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
- everything written by Wayne Booth, Kenneth Burke, or Marcus Tullius Cicero (except De Inventione)
What would you be if you weren't an English professor?
A pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
