The Department of English

Before I graduated from high school, I sat in on Philosophy classes at the University of Maryland and tried to be like Rimbaud. I read Dostoyevsky, Thoreau, and Kerouac, but my intellectual hero was Jean Paul Sartre. In 1961 I hitchhiked from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco where I worked on a surveying crew in the San Leandro Valley. After a year I bought a motorcycle and rode to Mexico City. Back home in D.C. I wrote a MA thesis on Henry James and Ivan Turgenev at the American University, where I first taught English composition. After I got my MA, I enrolled in the Ph.D. program at NYU. I taught Cultural Studies there until I got a job at Wayne State University in Detroit. I have taught English at Baruch College since 1972. I like to teach the Great Works couse where we read Sophocles, Vergil, Chuang Tzu, Murasaki Shikibu, Marguerite of Navarre, Sundiata and Cabeza de Vaca. I also enjoy teaching Shakespeare in the evenings. This semester my students wrote an essay on how three of Shakespeare’s women characters—Juliet, Hermia, and Portia— challenge and undermine patriarchal authority.

Schools attended: B.A. Western Maryland College, M.A. The American University, Ph.D. New York University.

Areas of specialization: The Renaissance—Shakespeare, Marlowe, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, Aphra Behn. The Romantics—William Blake, P. B. Shelley and Mary Shelley. Modern and Postmodern poetry.

Favorite Quotation: “Everything in the world knows how to seek for knowledge that they do not have, but do not know how to find what they already know. Everything in the world knows how to condemn what they dislike, but do not know how to condemn what they have which is wrong. This is what causes such immense confusion. It is as if the brightness of the sun and moon have been eclipsed above, while down below the hills and streams have lost their power, as though the natural flow of the four seasons had been broken. There is no humble insect, not even any plant, that has not lost its innate nature. This is the consequence for the world of seeking after knowledge... The good and honest people are ignored, while spineless flatterers are advanced.” (from The Book of Chuang Tzu)

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• Film Studies