Books

Many Ph.D.s turn their dissertations into books: I didn't do that, but I did publish most of my dissertation in print, as a series of journal articles. These articles were published (in revised form) during my time as an Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University, in Arizona Quarterly, The Columbia History of the American Novel, Contemporary Literature, and Centennial Review. In addition, I have co-edited a book of Essays in Postmodern Culture, published in 1993 by Oxford University Press.

I have done research and writing on a book-length project on postmodernism and information, intended as a critical account of the concepts of intelligence, mind, and information as they are expressed in social, technical, and literary terms during the post-WWII period in American culture. A portion of this project is about to be published as part of a book on internet culture: other portions will discuss the Cybernetics Group (a postwar think-tank that included Gregory Bateson, Norbert Weiner, von Neumann, and other scions of the information age), the peculiar inter-relations between CIA-sponsored LSD research and the internet, and aesthetic responses to anti-Freudian conceptions of mind in the military-industrial complex. I expect this project to take the form of hypertext, and I expect to publish it with a University press, over the internet.

I think that--in many cases--electronic dissemination of scholarly research is more efficacious than publication in print. Our profession is in the throes of a transition from the scholarly book to the scholarly article as the basic unit of discourse, and that change is being hastened by the rise in importance of the internet as a medium for all levels of intellectual exchange, from the most ephemeral to the most lasting. I am not anti-book, however: I recognize that books will retain a place in our system of literature for a very long time to come, and I recognize that there are some scholarly projects for which the book is the most appropriate medium.