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Dr. William Macnaughton

What are you currently reading?

I've been doing a lot of reading recently: Richard Russo's The Bridge of Sighs, Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean, Michael Crummey's Galore, two excellent novels by Marylynne Robinson called Gilead and Home (they're about essentially the same events told from two different perspectives), and Quarrel with the King by Adam Nicolson. Nicolson's book is non-fiction and I'll probably read some more non-fiction next (maybe Lawrence Wright's book about Al-Qaeda called The Looming Tower). I find that, these days, I'm reading almost as much non-fiction as fiction.

What are your five favourite texts?

My "favorite" text tends to be the one I'm reading at the moment, so it's almost impossible for me to remember which, of all the books I've read over the years, have brought me the most pleasure. Nonetheless, two do come to mind : Henry James's The Wings of the Dove (it took me a while to develop the patience to read James intelligently; when I did, this is the novel I liked best) and Rabbit at Rest by John Updike (he wrote four"Rabbit" novels and one novella; the one I mention is superb).

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

I'm not certain if I know what you mean by "useful for teaching," but I remember enjoying teaching most writers and texts, even ( in the Early American lit. course) a "terror" sermon by Jonathan Edwards called "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Most (though not all) of the time I also liked preparing to teach because it meant re-reading certain texts that I loved.Whitman's "Song of Myself" is one example; Frost's "Birches" and "Directive" are others. They are still among my favorite poems.

What texts have you had the most fun researching?

Although the articles I wrote were never accepted for publication, I very much enjoyed doing the research on two novels, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country. My research on the Faulkner novel (during which I read almost all of his fiction and a great deal of the scholarship devoted to him) taught me how to read his fiction well. My research on Wharton's novel  led me, in a circuitous way, to read most of Friedrich Nietzsche's writings (I became convinced that the novel was heavily influenced by Nietzsche's ideas); this was a lot of fun. So was spending a sabbatical year at the Mark Twain Papers at the U of California at Berkeley, researching and then completing a book on Twain (which, unlike the articles, did find a publisher).

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

Maybe a university administrator (I was working as one at U of W when I decided to go to grad school to get a Ph.d); maybe a high school English teacher and basketball coach (I did both for one year before being offered a job as a university administrator); maybe a lawyer (when I was an undergrad I considered applying to law school to become a criminal lawyer but I changed my mind when a practicing lawyer told me that most of my clients--almost all, in fact--would not be innocent) ; maybe a journalist writing primarily about sports, particularly baseball, about which I've always had a passionate interest (before deciding to go to teacher's college I applied and was turned down for a newspaper job).