Associate Dean of Constantin College
Professor of English

Office:  1st Floor Braniff
Phone: 972-721-5108
E-Mail: crider@udallas.edu

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.

Education

B.A., M.A. California State University, Sacramento
Ph.D. University of California, Riverside

 Recent Courses

• Across the Core
• The Seven Arts of Language
• Literary Traditions I, II,III,IV
• The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Language and Liberal Education
• Advanced Composition and the Teaching of Writing
• The Art of the English Sentence
• Classical Rhetoric
• Aristotle's Rhetoric                                                                                                                                   
• The Figure of Speech
• Classical Epic:  Homer and Vergil
• Dante
• Dante and Milton (with John Alvis)
• Shakespeare's Plays
• Shakespeare's Sonnets and Narrative Poems
• Literary Study I: The Lyric
• Literary Study II: Prose Narrative

Research Interests

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

Scholarship