I am an English teacher.
What is "English"?
It's an ancient study of poetry and rhetoric, as old as Socrates. Poetry and rhetoric-as seen in the sophists and in Plato-founded the ancient paideia, and it has been a major influence upon education ever since, the Aristotelian version of it at the heart of the medieval educational system and the Ciceronian, at the heart of the humanist project of the earlymodern period, both projects establishing "the humanities."
As Aristotle explains, poetry is essentially mimetic: In narrative, drama and lyric, it represents human actions in order to understand them. And rhetoric is the discovery of the persuasive in the political, forensic or ceremonial circumstances that define our lives. Rhetorical poetics is the study of language for self-understanding and responsible ethical and civic action. English is also a recent study in which, under the influence of Matthew Arnold, colleges teach students how to read and write literature in English. Before then, poetry and rhetoric were studied in school in their ancient languages. Now, English itself is a medium of study.
I teach students how to read, converse and write better about written texts. I do research in both poetics and rhetoric in my work on Shakespeare, most extensively in "With What Persuasion." I am also very interested in writing for those new to "English" to introduce them to both arts within our own marvelous language. "The Office of Assertion" is an introduction to the art of rhetoric and the academic essay, and I have begun writing an introduction to poetry through studying Shakespeare's Sonnets. Both introductions discuss the figure of speech poetry and rhetoric share-metaphor-which is the essential activity of culture and the corrective to the two deficiencies of our own contemporary culture: the literalism of too many of the scientific and the fundamentalism of too many of the religious.
B.A., M.A. California State University, Sacramento
Ph.D. University of California, Riverside
Shakespeare
Rhetoric and Composition
The English Renaissance
The Rhetorical Tradition, Ancient and Modern
The History and Character of Liberal Education
The English Bible as Literature
Aristotle's Rhetoric for Everybody (The Arts of Liberty Project 2015). http://www.artsofliberty.org/aristotles-rhetoric-everybody-chapter-listing
With What Persuasion: An Essay on Shakespeare and the Ethics of Rhetoric (Studies in Shakespeare, Vol. 18). New York: Peter Lang, 2009.
The Office of Assertion: An Art of Rhetoric for the Academic Essay. Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2005.
"Shakespeare and the Figures of Speech." The Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia. Ed. Bruce Smith, et al. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, [forthcoming].
"Love's Book of Honor and Shame: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Lyric Flourishing." Souls withLonging: Representations of Honor and Love in Shakespeare. Eds. Bernard J. Dobski and Dustin Gish. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011. 293-302.
"An Art of Gathering Scattered Humanity: Ciceronian Civic Humanism and the Defense of Responsible Rhetoric in De Oratore." Ramify 2 (2011): 67-92.
"Lyric Bearing: Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, Virgil's Aeneid and the Ship of Metaphor." The Garden of Lyric. Ed. Bainard Cowan. Dallas: Dallas Institute for Culture and the Humanities P, 2011. 105-119.
"The Human Bond, Broken and Mended: Ciceronian Sin and Redemption in King Lear." InBloom's Literary Themes: Sin and Redemption. Ed. Harold Bloom and Blake Hobby. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010. 135-145.
"Lyric Breath: Taking Seriously the Trope of Immortality in Shakespeare's Sonnets," in Core Texts, Community and Culture: Working Together for Liberal Education. Association for Core Texts and Courses: Selected Annual Proceedings from the 2004 Annual Conference. Ed. J. Scott Lee and Ron Weber, et al. Lanham, MD: UP of America Press, 2010. 97-102.
"Eloquence Repaired: Thomas Wilson's New Myth of the Origin and Nature of Oratory" inTalking Renaissance Texts: Essays in Honor of Stanley Stewart, ed. M. Thomas Hester and Jeffrey Kahan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009. 248-265.
"The Golden Amphora: Alienation and Tradition in Homer's Iliad" in Bloom's Literary Themes: Alienation. Ed. Harold Bloom and Blake G. Hobby. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2009.
"Through Nurture and Good Advisement: Paulina, Ideal Orator of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale." Cithara 47.2 (May, 2008): 17-36.
"Looking There: The Literary and the Dialectical in a Class on King Lear" in King Lear: Ignatius Critical Edition, ed. Joseph Pearce. Ft. Collins, Colorado: Ignatius Press, 2008: 285-295.
"Rhetorical Poetics and Shakespeare Studies: A Review Essay of Heinrich Plett's Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture," The Ben Jonson Journal 14.2 (November, 2007): 268-284.
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