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WCD
Web Page Starts Here
Hello. My name is William
C. Dowling. I'm a Professor of English at Rutgers University.
This page tells a little about my work and interests, and about
the courses I've taught.
In spring 2010, I'll
be teaching English 219 and English 220). Click on the links for
course descriptions.
 Here
is my personal history. I grew up in Warner,
New Hampshire, a little town in the middle of the state.
It had three white churches and two covered bridges and looked
like a Currier & Ives print. When I was away at college,
all the elms on Main Street died.
I was an undergraduate
at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. It was a great place to
be an English major because there was always snow on the ground
and one wanted to stay inside in Sanborn House library and read by
the fire.
English majors in my
generation took a three-day Comprehensive Examination in the
spring of our senior year. When we signed up for the major as
first-semester sophomores, we were given a list of works and
authors for which we'd be responsible on that exam. Most of the
material was covered in our core English courses, but we all
realized at the end that the list had an independent value: it
gave us an immediate overview of the total body of knowledge
-- literary periods, authors, works, intellectual background
-- that constituted the English major. It shaped our reading,
our thinking, and our discussions with each other about literature,
during three entire years of college. At the request of some
of my Rutgers students, I several years ago reconstructed the
list for their personal use. If you'd like a copy in PDFformat
to print down, click here on Senior
Comp Reading List.
I went to Harvard for
my PhD, concentrating on 18th-century English literature, early
American literature, and literary theory. My dissertation was
on three works by James Boswell -- the Tour to Corsica,
Tour to the Hebrides, and Life of Johnson -- and
the idea of the hero in the later eighteenth century. This became
my first book, The Boswellian Hero.
My most recent work on
American literature is  Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine,
Theology, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,
a book about the way the revolution in French clinical teaching
shaped Oliver Wendell Holmes's later career as author of The
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table and other works. I finished
the book during my recent research leave in Paris. If you'd like
to see a portion of the preface, which gives a pretty good idea
of my main argument, click on the link.
My account of Holmes
and literary Boston  takes as its center
the classical republican ideal of civic virtue as it shaped New
England thought and writing through the end of the nineteenth
century. A work that strongly influenced my own understanding
of Boston literary culture is Charles
Eliot Norton: The Art of Reform in Nineteenth-Century America.
My major scholarly project
at present is Ricoeur
on Time and Narrative,
an introduction to Paul Ricoeur's great three-volume philosophical
work, Temps et Recit. In my spare time, I'm also working
on two personal projects: Blossomberry
Farm, a memoir of the folk-blues scene at Dartmouth
in the 1960s, and Professor's Song: A Life in Teaching, a memoir of my career in literary
studies.
Every year, Rutgers English
majors ask me about going on for a Ph.D in English literature.
To help answer their questions, I composed a booklet on graduate
study in English for my students at Rutgers, explaining why I
think the traditional English major may be doomed to extinction
in the reasonably near future -- giving newly-minted English
Ph.Ds no place to find work -- and why the MAT degree may be
a better alternative than going on to a Ph.D program for those
who want to teach English and American literature. Since I keep
running out of printed copies, I've now put this up on the Web
as well: click here on Graduate Study
in English.
At Rutgers, I serve as
faculty advisor to the Peithessophian
Society, an undergraduate literary and debate society
whose history goes back to the early years of the nineteenth
century.
A lot of my students
figure out sort of late in the day that you can't undertake the
serious study of English and American literature unless you know
Latin, which they didn't take in high school. For those who want
to learn Latin on their own, I've composed a short booklet entitled
"Learning
Latin by the Dowling Method." It
tells you how to become a really competent Latinist in a reasonably
short period of time. Several generations of my students have
used the method with spectacular success.
Until recently, I directed
one or two Henry Rutgers theses per academic year. That ended
when I learned that the Rutgers Dean who supervises the program is a principle
member of the "Academic Oversight Committee" that attacked
me for criticizing commercialized Div IA sports at Rutgers.  As a small gesture of protest,
I've declined to teach honors seminars or direct Henry Rutgers
theses until this person resigns or is removed from office. The
last Henry Rutgers thesis I directed was Ben Remsen's brilliant
treatment of the problem of solipsism in the "anti-confluential"
fiction of David Foster Wallace. Subsequently, in collaboration
with my old
friend Robert H. Bell of Williams College, I wrote a reader's
companion to Infinite Jest, the extraordinary David Foster
Wallace novel that is being acclaimed as the Ulysses of
the 21st century. You can see a sample section by clicking here
on A
Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest.
At Rutgers, I try to
teach regularly in all the areas in which I do research. In English
literature, I have taught courses in 18th-century poetry and
seminars on Samuel Johnson and Boswell & Johnson. In American
literature, I teach both the first half of the American survey
-- "American Literature from the Puritans to the Civil War"
-- and English 352:315: "American Literature to 1800."
In literary theory, I have taught senior seminars in Theory of
Audience and the New Historicism. When there were small individual
sections of the course, I also regularly taught English
220. (For one of my 220 classes, I put up on the web
a short note entitled "Who's the
Narrator of Pale Fire." I'm leaving it up now for
those interested in Nabokov.) Another page I wrote for one of
my classes is "The Gradesavers'
Prufrock," which comments on a bit of work done
by an online termpaper service professedly staffed by "Harvard-educated"
individuals.
For my English 219 students,
I produced a handout on how to use the Oxford English Dictionary
when reading literary works written in earlier periods. I've
been asked to leave the handout "How to Use the OED" up on my site for people who
want to print copies. It is herewith left up.
In spring 1999, the intellectual
intrepidity of Rutgers English majors was memorably demonstrated
when over 120 students signed up for 18th-Century Poetry, a course
that covered not only standard authors like Dryden and Pope and
Johnson but "difficult" poems like Dyer's The Ruins
of Rome and Cowper's The Task. They were a heroic
and wonderful group.
This is only part of
the class. We had planned to have our picture taken by the memorial
marking the spot where, when Rutgers was still Queen's College,
Alexander Hamilton's artillery company covered Washington's retreat
to Trenton, but there were too many cars in the huge parking
lot that the Rutgers administration has installed around the
Hamilton memorial, so we moved locations and some students got
left out.
 The class in the picture was
also the latest to hear the never-ending saga of WCD, his friend
Robert H. Bell, and Stephen Duck, the Thresher Poet. If you would
like to meet RHB, click here on The Steven Duck Legacy.
In Spring 1998, I taught
a Rutgers honors seminar on England in the Age of Johnson. Here
is the amazing group of young people who took the seminar. They
were from all different majors, like history and physics and
political science and engineering. For a while it didn't look
as though we could all get on the same wavelength. Then one day
Christopher Hillary was saying something and Alexandra Sedehi
began a sentence by saying, "Nay, Sir, you are to consider
that . . ." Nobody  remembers what
Chris was supposed to consider, but we knew that we had all suddenly
found the wave length.
This picture was taken
outside Bishop House, which has the only halfway decent seminar
room at Rutgers. We weren't allowed to actually use it -- our
seminar was in Brett, right next to the big room that has the
pingpong table and the TV blaring all the time -- but we were
pleased to be allowed to have our pictures taken in front
of the building. (WCD offers his Johnson seminar at stated intervals,
either in the Honors Program at Rutgers or as a Douglass Scholars
Seminar. If you would like to see the course description, click
here on England in the Age of
Johnson.)
Another of the courses
I've most enjoyed teaching at Rutgers was a New Historicism seminar
taught in the Fall semester of 1995. Here is a picture of me
with the members of the seminar.
 We are all looking serious because
we had spent two weeks on the concept of "structural causality"
in Althusserian Marxism and didn't seem to be getting anywhere.
Right after this picture was taken we had a breakthrough, so
if the photographer had shown up three days later we would all
be smiling.
Another wonderful course
was the Mirror of Enlightenment, jointly offered in Fall 1996
by the English department and the Comparative Literature program.
This was a seminar in which we studied the relations between
French and English thought and politics in the 18th century,
and in which every assignment had readings in English and French.
Here I am with members of the seminar. We are standing in front
of the statue of William the Silent in the old quad .
(You can see a larger picture of the seminar with their bronze
friend by clicking here on William the
Silent.)
This group is a great
example of why so many faculty consider it a privilege to teach
at Rutgers. Look carefully at the picture. It appears, does it
not, to be a group of normal, happy, delightful American
university students? And it is, partly. Happy they were, most
days. Delightful they were, tous les jours. Normal they were
not. Every student in the picture was able to go home at night
and read an hour of Locke in English, then two hours of Montesquieu
in French, an hour of Swift or Gibbon in English, then an hour
or two of Voltaire or Rousseau or Diderot in French.
And this they did, night after night, week after week, until
we had covered the Enlightenment from Locke and Newton to the
French Revolution. It was, in its way, heroic. (If you look
carefully at the New Historicism seminar and the Mirror of Enlightenment
picture, you will see that two students, Rob Young and John Davies,
are present in both. Old men forget, and all shall be forgot,
but they'll remember with advantages what deeds we did those
days.)
I hope eventually to
teach several other seminars in two languages (English and Latin,
English and German), so I am leaving the original Mirror of Enlightenment
course description in place as a sort of prototype. If you
have friends who are Classics majors or German majors who
might want to take such a seminar -- or who are English majors
able to read Latin or German at an advanced level of competence
-- tell them to come to this page and click here on Mirror
of Enlightenment. They should get in touch with me by
e-mail if they would be interested in a similar course in their
language.
In Spring 2001,I taught J.R.R.
Tolkien & Oxford Christianity under
the English 321 "Literature and Spirituality" rubric.
The course focused on intensive study of Tolkien's Lord of
the Rings and other writings, but we also studied the Oxford
circle of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis -- the "Inklings"
-- and discussed at some length the larger problem of "literature
after the death of God."  Here is a class
picture we took on the last day of the course.For old students
who would like to revisit the course, Mark Zipkin has posted
a portion of one of my lectures -- "The Temptation of Galadriel" --
that can be listened to online.
In spring semester 2002
I taught a Rutgers General Honors seminar entitled "The
Face of Battle," focusing on the way individuals and cultures
try to come to terms with combat as an "unrepresentable"
experience -- pain, death, screams, confusion, agony -- through
the imposition of narrative structure: stories about heroism
and suffering and honor and national purpose. The course took
as its center  the work of the great military
historian John Keegan -- author of The Face of Battle,
The Mask of Command, The Price of Admiralty, and
other works -- and we also read Stephen Ambrose's Band of
Brothers, Alvin Kernan's Crossing the Line, Shakespeare's
Henry the Fifth, as well as viewing Kenneth Branaugh's
film version of Henry the Fifth and Stephen Spielberg's
Saving Private Ryan. A high point was the session we spent
with Commander Charles Standard,
a Helldiver -- dive bomber -- pilot who won the Navy Cross for
extraordinary bravery in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. His
visit came immediately after we had read Kernan's Crossing
the Line, with its first-hand account of the carrier war
in the Pacific. We found it a rare and moving experience to have
the chance to talk for three hours with a carrier pilot who had
actually lived through the events we had been discussing. It
was, as one member of the seminar said, like having someone walk
into the seminar room straight out of the pages of history. The
picture above shows the class with Commander Standard on the
day of his visit. I taught the same course in Spring 2004 as my farewell to the Honors Program, having
notified the director that I would not be available to teach
seminars again until Rutgers began to devote the same amount
of resources to its best and brightest students that it has been
devoting over the last 10 years to a handful of hired athletes
on the basketball and football teams. The splendid group with
whom I spent my farewell semester is pictured at right.
My most recent work as
an eighteenth-century scholar has been on the English verse epistle.
This is the subject of my book The Epistolary Moment,
which is also about the concept of "internal audience"
in literature. In early American literature, I have been working
on literary Federalism. Poetry
and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut is
about the Connecticut Wits, a group of poets who thought of their
poetry as a form of "symbolic action" that could change
the course of history. Literary Federalism in the Age of
Jefferson, which is about the literary opposition to
Thomas Jefferson and "American jacobinism," has just
been published.If you feel an irresistable urge to pre-order
a copy, you may do so by clicking on the cover.
My most recent work in
film studies is an essay on my favorite director, John Ford:
"John
Ford's Festive Comedy: Ireland Imagined in The Quiet Man." I'm also at work on an essay
on the turn-of-the-century school stories of Arthur
Stanwood Pier, about whom I've put up a Web page for
other people who might be interested in Pier's writings.
In literary theory, my
best-known book is Jameson, Althusser, Marx, an introduction
to Althusserian Marxism and the work of the American theorist
Fredric Jameson. It has been translated into a number of languages,
including Chinese and Korean. I keep a copy of the Korean translation
in my office so that Sean Yoon and Alicia Kim and my other Korean
students can read it and tell me what I said. I am a member of
the Twin Oaks Theory Seminar,  for which
my most recent paper was "The Gender
Fallacy." In published form, it appears in Theory's
Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Daphe Pata and
Will H. Corral (Columbia University Press, 2005).
My most recent publication
in literary theory, The
Senses of the Text, concerns the relations between
semantic theory and the problem of determinate meaning in literature.
It concentrates on Chomskyan linguistics and the work of Jerrold
J. Katz (The Metaphysics of  Meaning)
in philosophy of language. Some of my influences in literary
theory may be found on my Saints
& Heroes page.
Since I've received many
requests for offprints of my article "Scholarly
Publishing in the Age of Oprah," I asked permission
from The Journal of Scholarly Publishing to post a copy
here on my Web site. I have also posted a copy of "Literary
Studies v. Cultural Studies," my letter to The
Chronicle of Higher Education concerning the same general
problem, along with "Manfred Mickleson
Applies for an 18th-century Job," a letter that
I found in my files from an 18th-century search run by my department
some years ago. More recently, after reading about the
controversy at surrounding Cornel West's newly-released hip hop
CD, I did a bit of research on earlier members of the Harvard
faculty who had combined a career in popular music with eminence
as teachers and scholars. By way of providing context for the
West episode, I'm making available to the general public an excerpt
from Doo Wop Days: the Inside Story of
50s Rock 'n' Roll, a little-known book I was lucky enough
to run across in the used bin at Micawber's.
In a recent issue of
PMLA, Professor Wendell Harris predicts that in the next
10-20 years, most English departments will either become departments
of Cultural Studies or divide into separate Departments of Cultural
Studies and Departments of English. Since this seems to me a
prediction with important implications for Rutgers, I've put
up a page on "Literature &
Cultural Studies" that tries to visualize its possible
consequences.
In recent years, I have
done a good bit of research on standardized testing and college
admissions, in preparation for a book about American democracy
and the "consumer model of education." My most recent
substantial article on educational policy was "Why
America Needs the SAT," published in Academic
Questions in Winter, 1999.
I am proud of my membership
in the Drake Group, which was founded at the Drake Conference
on College Sports Corruption, a historic national meeting on
ways to save universities from being swallowed up by the TV-revenue-driven
behemoth of professionalized college sports. n response to requests
from Drake Group members, I've put up a copy of my review-essay
"Big Time Sports as Academic Prostitution,"
originally published in the journal Academic Questions,
and "Sports and Ressentiment: Why
the Boosters Run Ohio State," which appeared in
Social Science and Modern Society.
Another educational policy
issue that concerns me is teaching evaluation forms, which I
regard as "customer satisfaction surveys" that encourage
students to adopt a "consumer model" of education.
To understand why I see the commodity model as the single biggest
danger to genuine education in America read my Targum
op-ed column "Why We Should Abolish
Teaching Evaluations." Another short guide I've
composed on the "consumer model"is posted on my web
site. Click here for "5 Ways to Tell
If You Go to a Third-Rate University." Several semesters ago, my students
told me about an unspeakable web site called "Rateyourprofessors.com."
It inspired me to propose a similar site for use by professors.
To read the proposal, click here on Ratemystudents.com
Some of my students think
it's pretty funny that I detest the constant interjection of
"like" into sentences uttered by undergraduates, and
that I annually give out a Likosaurus Award to those who make
the greatest progress in their battle against Lykelyke
Syndrome. Michael Sun drew this caricature of me reacting
to a bad "like day" in class. He thought it was pretty
funny. (He did not laugh so hard when he found out what he
got for a course grade, ho ho.) Another student, Tim Steffens,
thought it was funny that I loathe and detest television and
keep telling my students to smash their TV sets and fill their
rooms with books. (I actually do think that the people in Hell
watch TV. Also that people who watch TV here on earth -- instead
of reading books and learning Greek and arguing with their friends
about Aristotle or Milton or Tocqueville -- are in Hell and simply
haven't realized it yet.) I've put Tim's
caricature of me exhorting a class to throw out their
TV sets on a separate page, so that you can see how funny he
thought he was being. (Tim was taking 18th-century poetry. He
flunked the course.) Last of all, some students think it's funny
that I keep telling them that students who misspell words and
won't learn the elementary rules of English punctuation are doomed
to be total failures in life, no matter how admirable they may
be in other respects. I've put the "No
Bull" exhortation that I hand out to my classes
up along with Michael and Tim's caricatures.
Some personal notes.
My wife and I have recently moved to Manhattan, but for the convenience
of friends and old students I've retained my longtime PO Box
in Princeton (Box 1181, Princeton, NJ, 08542). Mail sent there
is regularly forwarded to me. My favorite pastime outside of
reading and studying languages is training for marathons. Until
I got injured several years ago I ran the Marine Corps Marathon
every fall and the Vermont City Marathon in Burlington, Vermont
every spring. For a picture of me in marathon trim, with
my amazing mother Lillian Dowling and my younger brother John,
click here on Vermont City Marathon.
I am hoping that my injury will get better and I will run marathons
again. My favorite contemporary writers are Patrick O'Brian and
Elmore Leonard. My favorite "personal" writer is Parson
Woodforde, an 18th-century Norfolk clergyman who kept a five-volume
diary covering most of his adult life. I also play blues guitar
-- my heroes are Hubert Sumlin and Mance Lipscomb -- and listen
to jazz (Miles Davis, Bill Evans) and classical music (Vivaldi,
Corelli, Handel, Mozart). Another of my musical enthusiasms is
gospel, and here at Rutgers, I am a huge fan of the Liberated Gospel Choir. (For
the story of how my students have been expanding my musical and
cultural horizons, click here on Jerry
Garcia.)
With Mrs. D, I spend
part of every year in Paris. A few years ago, I began doing restaurant
reviews for the guide Bon Sejour. For a review of my favorite
Paris restaurant, click here on Le Refuge
du Passe.
During the Vietnam war,
I was principal organizer of the New
England Resistance, whose role in breaking the will of
the Johnson administration has, until recently, never been given
its due by historians (mainly because the story of the antiwar
movement has relied on the accounts of those who spent the Vietnam
period hiding out behind student deferments or Peace Corps exemptions or
other Bill Clinton-type dodges for "opposing" the war
while remaining perfectly safe). Now the story has been told
in Michael Foley's book Confronting the War Machine. It
will make a lot of so-called tenured radicals unhappy, but it
is going to have a marked effect on the way future generations
understand the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Just because I opposed
the war in Vietnam does not mean that I consider all wars the
same. They can be quite different. I helped my graduate school
friend Chip Szalkorski compose a page explaining why the War in Iraq, for instance, is being
fought for entirely different reasons than the Vietnam War. My
contribution was research on the Constitutional amendment --
the one that gives every American a inalienable right to drive
an SUV no matter how many American soldiers are dying for Mideast
oil -- that makes the war perfectly legal.
 You are person
number
 
to
have visited this page since it materialized in cyberspace, no
doubt with the blessings of the good saint himself, on St. Patrick's
day, 1996.
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For
an abridged version of an op ed that spells out the actual context
of my remark, click here on 
I was attacked
in the Daily Targum in a statement signed by Dean 
President McCormick
recently announced that, despite the national economic downturn,
his hideous plan for turning College Avenue into a modernist
wasteland will be going forward. For background, click here on 