The Basic Assumptions of Literary Biography. An analysis of what makes the writing of literary biography possible: how to assemble a portrait of an individual based on the remaining evidence the author found. If taken seriously, it should have put a stop to this genre; obviously it didn’t.
Structural Anomalies as Biographical Clues: Inferring Authorial Belief in Mimetic Fiction. Establishes the reasoning and the circumstances in which one can make inferences about an author’s belief from a work of fiction.s
The Legal Basis of Fielding’s Fictional Development. Analyzes how the treatment of law developed and changed, suggesting parallels with the author’s changing social conscience and professional duties.
Henry Miller and the Uses of Insanity. Exploring and analyzing how views on insanity explain the world view underlying Miller’s fiction and essays.
Conceptual Scholarship. A satire on how publishing demands for academics leads to irresponsible citations, suggesting a journal that avoids that responsibility.
Elite, Popular and Mass Literature: What People Really Read. Challenges the definition of literature to study every possible structured text, including graffiti, a cereal box, billboards, and other words that catch our eyes and force us to read them.
Anything but Literature: Ideology and the Study of Popular Culture. A theoretical justification for studying popular culture.
Rubber Stamp Art. Taking rubber stamps seriously, and outlining the theoretical and aesthetic frameworks of what is possible with this limited media.
Skywriting as the Literal Iconography of Flight. Looking at the theoretical significance of what skywriting means to the observer, and how it forces the viewer to actively construct meaning.
Reflexive Graffiti. Analyzes a specific kind of graffiti that creates an powerful link between its author and the future readers, treating it as archeology and autobiography.
A Neglected First in Book Printing. A humorous response to a graduate school assignment that asked to describe a book found in the library stacks. The book, in the rare book room, had been replaced in the stacks by a wooden dummy.
Editor’s Journal, or, How We Worked Three Years for 2 ½ Cents an Hour. A narrative of the co-author’s frustrations trying to get a multi-ethnic college anthology published.
Rationales for Teaching Subjective Writing. Talk given at professional conference.