Projects

I recently finished up my undergraduate degrees (English and Secondary Ed.), and I don't feel any different. But I would like to start writing more often with the intention of getting things published (and thus shared with a wider audience) instead of merely getting an acceptable grade for them.

So here are my current big projects (aside from teaching!) in order of ambition:

• "Redescribing Shelley's Defense of Poetry: Rorty, Rich, and the Making of a Neopragmatist Poetics": In a few months I'm hoping to completely revise it and submit it for publication.
• "A Defense of Reading" [New title: "Reasons for Reading"]: Similar to the attention I gave to Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry," but more in terms of the cultural importance of reading. I've really been wanting a short essay on this topic for my students once I start teaching, and, since I couldn't find any, I decided to write one. It'll draw on Amusing Ourselves to Death, Manufacturing Consent, and an awesome but horrifying quote by Lenny Dykstra. Expect to see it before the end of summer.
• "If Learning Mattered: How Overemphasizing Quantitative Indicators Distorts the Aims of Institutions of Learning" [tentative title]: This will probably be my master's thesis if I get the topic approved. If not, I'm still writing it.
• a&b: A volume of poetry that is still a long ways off. (One poem in particular is going to take an absurd amount of research.) Very much in line with the poetics I've described in the top essay.
• "Works of Love": Creative non-fiction essay on ethics and the concept of unconditional love, with continual reference to Kierkegaard's beautiful Works of Love. I started this in 2008, but I don't plan on finishing it any time soon.