Theory of the Novel
Fall, 2001

John Dewey Seminar
Fall 2002

I regularly teach a graduate seminar on D. H. Lawrence, and have supervised some dozen doctoral dissertations on Lawrence. I delivered papers at the International Conference on D. H. Lawrence in Ottawa, 1993, and Taos, 1998, where I also chaired a session.

Other teaching has included a graduate course I designed called "The Sexual Body and Literature," several on Anarchism and Literature, seminars on Thomas Hardy, and increasingly in recent years, seminars on Dewey's Art as Experience and Literature. In 1998 I taught a combined undergraduate and Master's level course on Modern Drama. I have taught "Literature and Psychology" several times, both as an undergraduate course and as a graduate seminar. Three of Virginia Woolf's novels have been repeatedly taught in my courses. A long list of authors, mostly novelists, has been taught in my courses over the years; quite a number of these have been works in translation.

My doctoral dissertation on Don Quixote --even though I was and am in English-- led to a book (1971) published by the University of Texas Press, Don Quixote and the Dulcineated World. "Dulcineated" is my own invention to connote the degradation and sentimental idealization of woman in the Quixote.

A great deal of my effort has gone into the journal Paunch, which I have both edited and published from 1963 until the final issue, #69-70, in 1999. The name of the journal, after Sancho Panza ("Sacred Belly"), points to my commitment to the topic of the body in literature. Two special issues have been on Lawrence; one in the 1960s, the second, Paunch #63-64, entitled The Passional Secret Places of Life, 1990; this contains my own article " `The Way Our Sympathy Flows and Recoils:' Lawrence's Last Theory of the Novel." The issue was reviewed favorably by Mark Spilka in Novel: A Forum on Fiction.

Besides innumerable items edited in Paunch and a good many of my own articles in it, I have published in Massachusetts Review, Dissent, Minnesota Review, International Review of Psychoanalysis, Journal of Literary Criticism (Delhi), l'Arc (Paris--my article, translated into French, on the high-porn classic, Story of O:), New Ideas in Psychology, and other locations. In the 1990s, I published a monograph length study on Melville's Billy Budd in REAL (Research in English and American Literature, an annual volume published in Germany) ; and another monograph-length work on Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part One, an anarchist reading, appeared in Works & Days, with discussion by five commentators and my rejoinder. My long-term interest in Dewey's Art as Experience led to a large article in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society in 1995, and a recent review-article in the same journal on Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation, edited by Larry Hickman (Indiana Univ. Press, 1998). My long-term interests in the work of Wilhelm Reich and the reading of literature led to a special issue of Paunch, actually a short book, containing my articles on 5 works of literature and a 53-page introductory essay (Paunch #67-68, 1997, 217 pp.) My interests in sexuality itself, not in literature but in Reich's sense of "self-regulation," led to my book, The Sexual Body: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, published as a 310-page issue of The Journal of Mind and Behavior in 1985. It has a 900 item bibliography. In that journal, I have also published two articles developing my own theory of the mind-body relationship, one in 1982, one in 1992.

Professionally, I have organized and led 4 special sessions at the M.L.A. convention, and delivered papers at various conferences, including one on William Godwin's Political Justice, at the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, held in Utrecht in 1996. Currently, I am circulating a long article entitled "Experiencing Hamlet." I organized and supervised two national conferences, lasting several days each, held at my university: one on the philosopher and aesthetician Stephen C. Pepper (1891-1972); the other, held in 1985, on Literature and the Body.

I will retire from full-time teaching in 2000, but have arranged to continue teaching one course per year. I am continuing to direct several dissertations in progress. Meanwhile I work on my book on Dewey's aesthetics and emotional wholeness in literature.

(December 1999)