BenJonson

Greetings

and welcome to my page.

I'm a lifelong learner who teaches English and Humanities at an Urban University in the Eastern United States. I have a Masters Degree with honors in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where I studied, among others, with Marc Shell. While obtaining the PhD, I survived for eight years by working as a Housepainter. I've published over 16 articles in peer reviewed journals, including Review of English Studies, The Shakespeare Yearbook, Notes and Queries, Critical Survey, Cahiers Élisabéthains, and The Rocky Mountain Review of Languages and Literature, University of Tennessee Law Review, and The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review. I debated Stanley Wells on the authorship question in the Washington Post. He has since seemed reluctant to cross swords again.

My heroes include J. Thomas Looney, Leslie Howard, Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir George Greenwood, T.S. Elliot, George Orwell and John Stuart Mill.

Wise Words of T.S. Eliot

But on giving the matter a little attention, we perceive that criticism, far from being a simple and orderly field of beneficent activity, from which impostors can be readily ejected, is no better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators, who have not even arrived at the articulation of their differences. Here, one would suppose, was a place for quiet co-operative labour. The critic, one would suppose, if he is to justify his existence, should endeavour to discipline his personal prejudices and cranks—tares to which we are all subject— and compose his differences with as many of his fellows as possible, in the common pursuit of true judgment. When we find that quite the contrary prevails, we begin to suspect that the critic owes his livelihood to the violence and extremity of his opposition to other critics, or else to some trifling oddities of his own with which he contrives to season the opinions which men already hold, and which out of vanity or sloth they prefer to maintain. We are tempted to expel the lot. -- TS Eliot

These wise words were sent to me today -- what day, you ask? - today -- by Dr. Heward Wilkinson. Read them and weep at how little in our world has changed. Or else pretend not to understand them.