Dr Paul Tankard
BA, DipEd, MA, PhD (Monash)
| paul.tankard@otago.ac.nz | |
| Phone | 64 3 479 7724 |
| Fax | 64 3 479 8558 |
| Office | 1S1 First Floor Arts Building Albany Street Dunedin |
| Department of English University of Otago PO Box 56 Dunedin New Zealand |
Expertise
Samuel Johnson and James Boswell
C. S. Lewis and the Inklings
Composition
Teaching
ENGL 327 Essay and Feature Writing
Research, Teaching and Possible Supervision
My main area of scholarly writing and research is Samuel Johnson, and his biographer, James Boswell. I am preparing an edition – the first ever – of a selection of Boswell's journalistic writings, and in March 2007 I was privileged to spend a month on a Fellowship at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, working on this project. My fourth-year “Grub Street” paper picks up some of these interests, and I would welcome the chance to supervise in these areas.
I have an abiding interest in the Inklings, particularly C.S. Lewis. I coordinate the fourth-year Fantasy Worlds paper, and have given lectures on Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Lewis's Narnia Chronicles, in Summer School papers.
Much of my teaching is concentrated in the Department's papers in writing /rhetoric /composition.
I am interested in the ongoing transformations of literate culture, and the neglected place of non-canonical genres in the history of reading. This of course intersects with the ubiquitous but often (from a “literary” point of view) invisible and nameless genre of non-narrative prose that is the focus of my teaching of writing. But it also takes me into topics like aphorisms, lists, rock lyrics, anthologies and commonplace books – and, of course, the essay.
My work is informed by such theorists as Gerard Genette (“paratextuality”), and Michel de Certeau (“everyday life”).
Publications
Refereed Articles
This Millennium
"Johnson and the Essay," Samuel Johnson in Context, ed. Jack Lynch (forthcoming: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011)
"Reference Point: Samuel Johnson and the Encyclopaedias: The David Fleeman Memorial Lecture, 2007," Eighteenth-Century Life, 33:3 (2009), 37-64.
"Johnson and the Walkable City," Eighteenth-Century Life, 32:1 (Winter 2008), 1-22.
"Didactic Pleasures: Learning in Lewis's Narnia," for SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Journal, 24 (2007), 65-86.
"The Lion, the Witch and the Multiplex," Fantasy Fiction into Film: Essays, ed. Leslie Stratyner and James R. Keller (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2007), 80-92.
“Reading Lists,” Prose Studies, 28: 3 (December, 2006), 337-60.
“Samuel Johnson's History of Memory,” Studies in Philology, 102: 1 (Winter, 2005), 110-42.
“The 'Great Cham' and the 'English Aristophanes': Samuel Johnson, Samuel Foote, and 'Harmless Pleasure',” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 15 (2004), 83-96.
“Contexts for Johnson's Dictionary,” Genre, 35:2 (Summer, 2002), 253-82.
“Vive les Paratexts: A Review Essay,” of Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997), Kevin Jackson, Invisible Forms: A Guide to Literary Curiosities (2000), and Anthony Rota, Apart from the Text (1998), The Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 26: 3 & 4 (2002), 195-219.
“ 'That Great Literary Projector': Samuel Johnson's Designs, or Projected Works,” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 13 (2002), 103-180.
“Coasts, Interiors, Islands: Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Place,” The Critical Review, 41 (2001), 66-77.
Previous Millennia
“A Clergyman's Reading: Books Recommended by Samuel Johnson,” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 11 (2000), 125-43.
“Free Verse and Traditional Form in Eliot, Lawrence and Hope,” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, 93 (May 2000), 37-50.
“The Rambler's Second Audience: Johnson and the Paratextual 'Part of Literature',” the Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, 24: 4 (Fourth Quarter 2000), 239-56.
“A Petty Writer: Johnson and the Rambler Pamphlets,” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 10 (1999), 67-87.
“Pockets of Wisdom, Samples of Text: Recent Revivals of the Very Small Book,” Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 21: 4 (Fourth Quarter, 1997), 226-44.
“An Empty Gesture: John Ashbery's Flow Chart,” Meridian, 16: 1 (May, 1997), 33-46.
“Wilson's 'Lewis' and Wilson's Wilson: A Meditation on Biography and Misreading,” Journal of Myth, Fantasy and Romanticism, 2: 2 (Spring, September, 1993), 29-33.
Academic Reviewing
I have written by invitation seventeen reviews of scholarly titles for academic journals.
Non-academic Writing
I believe it is important for scholars – and particularly for me, as a teacher of writing – to write for non-specialist audiences; so I continue to write reviews and other articles for publication in The Age (Melbourne), The Australian, Eureka Street, Quadrant, The Southern Johnsonian and (recently) The Otago Daily Times.