kevin McCarron - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by kevin McCarron
Modern Language Review, 2010
Yearbook of English studies, 1996
Modern Language Review, 2007
Modern Language Review, 2009
American journal of Islam and society, Apr 1, 1999
Body & Society, Nov 1, 1995
SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, Oct 17, 2014
... Carter's protagonist focuses on the act of tattooing and ignores meaning, while Ishmael ... more ... Carter's protagonist focuses on the act of tattooing and ignores meaning, while Ishmael focuses on hermeneutics at the expense of the physical act of ... a junkie himself:'He had more ink than Satan: calves, neck, and arms a near solid catalog of tattooed Aryan brotherhood icons ...
In the twenty first century, the phrase "Global Age" I suggest in this article refers not to geog... more In the twenty first century, the phrase "Global Age" I suggest in this article refers not to geography alone, as it would once have done, but much more now to technology. Preeminent among the numerous implications of this shift for teachers, particularly in Higher Education, is that `knowledge transmission pedagogy" is of increasingly less value to students, although many academics, across all disciplines, are still unwilling to acknowledge this major shift in the dialectic between teaching and learning. Drawing on my years of experience as an academic and as a professional stand-up comedian this article argues that, irrespective of comedy, academics can profitably use many techniques and strategies routinely employed by professional stand-up comedians to encourage their audiences to interact with them. It is in the uniqueness of specific audience interaction, the article suggests, that the best student learning and the most enjoyable academic teaching occurs. `Teachers need to keep a sense of play in teaching…teaching is an improviser"s art" Kenneth J. Eble The word `global" does not now immediately summon up, as it once did, geographical images; actually, our Western images are completely opposed to the natural, primeval specificity of `geography". Technology, especially email and the internet, dominate our understanding of the word `global". We know that anybody, anywhere, with internet access, can receive information from Google, or Wikipedia on any subject in the world. The most important implication of this revolution for academics is that in a culture where `knowledge" can be instantaneously accessed, `knowledge transmission pedagogy" serves little purpose, at least, not for the student. Kenneth J. Eble writes `Professors do not need to court media popularity, but they can learn from the performing arts" ((Eble, 1998: 13), and I argue here for the desirability of teachers learning specifically from stand-up comedians. Even, perhaps especially, in an age of Web CT, teaching, like stand-up comedy, is best experienced `live". For exactly half the twenty years that I have been an academic, I have also worked throughout Great Britain, and also in France and Spain, as a stand-up comedian. Despite the chronological symmetry, I have opposed attitudes and indeed objectives as a teacher and as a comedian. As a comedian I want to make myself indispensable to an audience. I want the crowd to demand that I be installed as the MC so they can see me every week, but as a teacher my goal is to make myself redundant to the students before the end of every course. What struck me first about performing stand-up comedy was that although it was much harder than I had ever realized to be professionally funny, as an objective it was refreshingly clear: my job was to make people laugh. If they laughed I was doing a good job; if they didn"t laugh, I was not. Naturally, I compared that purity of purpose with what I realized was the indefinable, never articulated (at least McCarron, K. Stand-up comedy and teaching in a 'global age' Reflecting Education 122 Stand-up comedy and teaching in a 'global age' Reflecting Education 125
Modern Language Review, Jul 1, 1999
1. Cultural predicaments and authorial responses 2. A Seraph's Eloquence: Emerson's inspi... more 1. Cultural predicaments and authorial responses 2. A Seraph's Eloquence: Emerson's inspired language and Milton's apocalyptic prose 3. Margaret Fuller's The Two Herberts: Emerson and the disavowal of sequestered virtue 4. As If a Green Bough were Laid Across the Page: Thoreau's seventeenth-century landscapes and extravagant personae 5. Melville's Mardi and Moby-Dick: marvelous travel narratives, and seventeenth-century methods of inquiry 6. Surmising the infidel: Melville reads Milton.
English Studies in Canada, 2009
made by inserting ink into the layers of skin to change the pigment. In the quotation above, Juli... more made by inserting ink into the layers of skin to change the pigment. In the quotation above, Juliet Fleming describes the tattoo as a "self-infl icted wound, " and indeed the word tattoo is taken from the Samoan word tatau, meaning "open wound. " Skin, fl esh, body: none are synonymous, but they are all inseparable from one another. Flesh precedes in a sense the body, while skin covers fl esh. Although this essay focuses on prison tattoos, it should be noted from the outset that the tattoo, in any environment, is typically seen as unnatural.
Modern Language Review, Jul 1, 1999
Wyn Kelley writes: "Town" is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning, in its first, now obsolete sense, simpl... more Wyn Kelley writes: "Town" is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning, in its first, now obsolete sense, simply "an enclosed place or piece of ground, an enclosure: a field, garden, yard, court" (OED)… "City", deriving from the Latin civitas, owes its primary meaning to the root civas or citizen; hence it first signified the people who make up a community, only later acquiring the meaning of urbs, the place "occupied by the community". 1 However, certainly by the nineteenth century the city of London had emphatically lost this sense of 'community'. Monroe Spears, in Dionysus And The City: Modernism In Twentieth-Century Poetry, offers a similar etymology, but notes an important, modern shift in understanding: The word city derives from civitas, city-state, which is properly an aggregation of cives, citizens; civilization has the same derivation. The city, then, even in its etymology, is internal as well as external: the city is a society of individuals who subscribe to an ideal or rational order…In earlier times, Civitas Terrena, the Earthly City, was seen as striving toward a Heavenly City, Civitas Dei; not expecting to embody on earth its perfection, but not without hope of achieving the Good Society. For the moderns, however, the City is seen as falling (things fall apart; falling towers) or as fallen (towers upside down in air; la tour abolie) and therefore moving in the other direction, toward the Infernal City. 2 From this perspective, all the texts being discussed are 'modern'-they all represent the city as 'Infernal': a place of secrets and mysteries, enchantment and ruin, allure and entrapment. Julian Wolfreys, in Writing London, notes of nineteenth-century literary representations of London: 'London as both a real city and a place of the imagination, a symbolic construct always already something other than that which its mere presence indicated, needed a writing necessary to its
Critical Survey, 1997
William Golding's Fire Down Below (1989) is the last in his 'Sea Trilogy', a sequence... more William Golding's Fire Down Below (1989) is the last in his 'Sea Trilogy', a sequence of novels which began in 1980 with Rites of Passage and continued in 1987 with Close Quarters. Edmund Talbot, Golding's young, aristocratic protagonist, finally arrives in Australia shortly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars and this sea-borne bildungsroman is brought to an end. The response to Fire Down Below was extremely enthusiastic, and markedly different from the cautious and even mildly hostile response which greeted Close Quarters. The great majority of reviewers agreed that the happy ending of Fire Down Below made it Golding's most optimistic novel. John Bayley wrote: ' Fire Down Below brings the whole magical enterprise to a prosperous and happy conclusion',1 while John Fowles wrote: 'In this black-besotted age some may be unsettled by the happy ending, indeed by the generally jaunty (a word that kept perversely returning to me as I read) spirit of this closing leg.'2 However, the last of Golding's books published in his life-time can be read as a deeply conservative political allegory and, overall, as one of his most deeply pessimistic novels. Talbot may conclude his three volume voyage to Australia by accepting the assertion of his fellow passenger Mrs Prettiman that the Odyssey provides no paradigm for his experience, but when Summers, the first lieutenant, gives him some clothes at the beginning of Fire Down Below Talbot immediately finds a Homeric parallel: 'I took down the Iliad, therefore, and read in book zeta the story of Glaucus and Diomede. They had exchanged armour recklessly, it seemed, trading bronze armour for gold.'3 Rites of Passage, with its two separate journals, is a novel very much concerned with reading and 'misreading', and in Fire Down Below Talbot strikingly misinterprets this incidents: 'I now under© CS 1997
Modern Language Review, 2010
Yearbook of English studies, 1996
Modern Language Review, 2007
Modern Language Review, 2009
American journal of Islam and society, Apr 1, 1999
Body & Society, Nov 1, 1995
SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, Oct 17, 2014
... Carter's protagonist focuses on the act of tattooing and ignores meaning, while Ishmael ... more ... Carter's protagonist focuses on the act of tattooing and ignores meaning, while Ishmael focuses on hermeneutics at the expense of the physical act of ... a junkie himself:'He had more ink than Satan: calves, neck, and arms a near solid catalog of tattooed Aryan brotherhood icons ...
In the twenty first century, the phrase "Global Age" I suggest in this article refers not to geog... more In the twenty first century, the phrase "Global Age" I suggest in this article refers not to geography alone, as it would once have done, but much more now to technology. Preeminent among the numerous implications of this shift for teachers, particularly in Higher Education, is that `knowledge transmission pedagogy" is of increasingly less value to students, although many academics, across all disciplines, are still unwilling to acknowledge this major shift in the dialectic between teaching and learning. Drawing on my years of experience as an academic and as a professional stand-up comedian this article argues that, irrespective of comedy, academics can profitably use many techniques and strategies routinely employed by professional stand-up comedians to encourage their audiences to interact with them. It is in the uniqueness of specific audience interaction, the article suggests, that the best student learning and the most enjoyable academic teaching occurs. `Teachers need to keep a sense of play in teaching…teaching is an improviser"s art" Kenneth J. Eble The word `global" does not now immediately summon up, as it once did, geographical images; actually, our Western images are completely opposed to the natural, primeval specificity of `geography". Technology, especially email and the internet, dominate our understanding of the word `global". We know that anybody, anywhere, with internet access, can receive information from Google, or Wikipedia on any subject in the world. The most important implication of this revolution for academics is that in a culture where `knowledge" can be instantaneously accessed, `knowledge transmission pedagogy" serves little purpose, at least, not for the student. Kenneth J. Eble writes `Professors do not need to court media popularity, but they can learn from the performing arts" ((Eble, 1998: 13), and I argue here for the desirability of teachers learning specifically from stand-up comedians. Even, perhaps especially, in an age of Web CT, teaching, like stand-up comedy, is best experienced `live". For exactly half the twenty years that I have been an academic, I have also worked throughout Great Britain, and also in France and Spain, as a stand-up comedian. Despite the chronological symmetry, I have opposed attitudes and indeed objectives as a teacher and as a comedian. As a comedian I want to make myself indispensable to an audience. I want the crowd to demand that I be installed as the MC so they can see me every week, but as a teacher my goal is to make myself redundant to the students before the end of every course. What struck me first about performing stand-up comedy was that although it was much harder than I had ever realized to be professionally funny, as an objective it was refreshingly clear: my job was to make people laugh. If they laughed I was doing a good job; if they didn"t laugh, I was not. Naturally, I compared that purity of purpose with what I realized was the indefinable, never articulated (at least McCarron, K. Stand-up comedy and teaching in a 'global age' Reflecting Education 122 Stand-up comedy and teaching in a 'global age' Reflecting Education 125
Modern Language Review, Jul 1, 1999
1. Cultural predicaments and authorial responses 2. A Seraph's Eloquence: Emerson's inspi... more 1. Cultural predicaments and authorial responses 2. A Seraph's Eloquence: Emerson's inspired language and Milton's apocalyptic prose 3. Margaret Fuller's The Two Herberts: Emerson and the disavowal of sequestered virtue 4. As If a Green Bough were Laid Across the Page: Thoreau's seventeenth-century landscapes and extravagant personae 5. Melville's Mardi and Moby-Dick: marvelous travel narratives, and seventeenth-century methods of inquiry 6. Surmising the infidel: Melville reads Milton.
English Studies in Canada, 2009
made by inserting ink into the layers of skin to change the pigment. In the quotation above, Juli... more made by inserting ink into the layers of skin to change the pigment. In the quotation above, Juliet Fleming describes the tattoo as a "self-infl icted wound, " and indeed the word tattoo is taken from the Samoan word tatau, meaning "open wound. " Skin, fl esh, body: none are synonymous, but they are all inseparable from one another. Flesh precedes in a sense the body, while skin covers fl esh. Although this essay focuses on prison tattoos, it should be noted from the outset that the tattoo, in any environment, is typically seen as unnatural.
Modern Language Review, Jul 1, 1999
Wyn Kelley writes: "Town" is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning, in its first, now obsolete sense, simpl... more Wyn Kelley writes: "Town" is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning, in its first, now obsolete sense, simply "an enclosed place or piece of ground, an enclosure: a field, garden, yard, court" (OED)… "City", deriving from the Latin civitas, owes its primary meaning to the root civas or citizen; hence it first signified the people who make up a community, only later acquiring the meaning of urbs, the place "occupied by the community". 1 However, certainly by the nineteenth century the city of London had emphatically lost this sense of 'community'. Monroe Spears, in Dionysus And The City: Modernism In Twentieth-Century Poetry, offers a similar etymology, but notes an important, modern shift in understanding: The word city derives from civitas, city-state, which is properly an aggregation of cives, citizens; civilization has the same derivation. The city, then, even in its etymology, is internal as well as external: the city is a society of individuals who subscribe to an ideal or rational order…In earlier times, Civitas Terrena, the Earthly City, was seen as striving toward a Heavenly City, Civitas Dei; not expecting to embody on earth its perfection, but not without hope of achieving the Good Society. For the moderns, however, the City is seen as falling (things fall apart; falling towers) or as fallen (towers upside down in air; la tour abolie) and therefore moving in the other direction, toward the Infernal City. 2 From this perspective, all the texts being discussed are 'modern'-they all represent the city as 'Infernal': a place of secrets and mysteries, enchantment and ruin, allure and entrapment. Julian Wolfreys, in Writing London, notes of nineteenth-century literary representations of London: 'London as both a real city and a place of the imagination, a symbolic construct always already something other than that which its mere presence indicated, needed a writing necessary to its
Critical Survey, 1997
William Golding's Fire Down Below (1989) is the last in his 'Sea Trilogy', a sequence... more William Golding's Fire Down Below (1989) is the last in his 'Sea Trilogy', a sequence of novels which began in 1980 with Rites of Passage and continued in 1987 with Close Quarters. Edmund Talbot, Golding's young, aristocratic protagonist, finally arrives in Australia shortly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars and this sea-borne bildungsroman is brought to an end. The response to Fire Down Below was extremely enthusiastic, and markedly different from the cautious and even mildly hostile response which greeted Close Quarters. The great majority of reviewers agreed that the happy ending of Fire Down Below made it Golding's most optimistic novel. John Bayley wrote: ' Fire Down Below brings the whole magical enterprise to a prosperous and happy conclusion',1 while John Fowles wrote: 'In this black-besotted age some may be unsettled by the happy ending, indeed by the generally jaunty (a word that kept perversely returning to me as I read) spirit of this closing leg.'2 However, the last of Golding's books published in his life-time can be read as a deeply conservative political allegory and, overall, as one of his most deeply pessimistic novels. Talbot may conclude his three volume voyage to Australia by accepting the assertion of his fellow passenger Mrs Prettiman that the Odyssey provides no paradigm for his experience, but when Summers, the first lieutenant, gives him some clothes at the beginning of Fire Down Below Talbot immediately finds a Homeric parallel: 'I took down the Iliad, therefore, and read in book zeta the story of Glaucus and Diomede. They had exchanged armour recklessly, it seemed, trading bronze armour for gold.'3 Rites of Passage, with its two separate journals, is a novel very much concerned with reading and 'misreading', and in Fire Down Below Talbot strikingly misinterprets this incidents: 'I now under© CS 1997
Narratives of Addiction: Savage Usury, 2022
Narratives of Addiction: Savage Usury is the first book to argue, in the face of more than a cent... more Narratives of Addiction: Savage Usury is the first book to argue, in the face of more than a century’s received wisdom, that drug addiction and alcoholism are undoubtedly evidence of individual moral flaws. However, the sense of morality that underlies this book is completely severed from Christianity. Instead, it is influenced in particular by the writings of the nineteenth-century German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Frederick Nietzsche, both of whom insisted that a genuine morality was actually incompatible with Christianity. The sequence of chapters moves from addictions on the streets, into rehab clinics, and finally into the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. This is the first book to argue that the search for pleasure drives alcoholism and drug addiction and not the “numbing of pain”. Throughout the book I reject the claims of the medical profession, as embodied by the American Medical Association, that drug addiction and alcoholism are diseases, and further argue that they do not have the authority to tell hundreds of millions of Americans that addiction is not a moral failing. I also query throughout the book the claims of neuroscience, psychology, and the social sciences that addictions to alcohol and drugs are attributable to causes that their specific disciplines are best suited to understand. I argue that there is nothing complex about addiction: it is a simple behavioural disorder. The language routinely employed to discuss addiction is similarly not complex, just confused, and so it is also the rhetoric of addiction discourse, especially its use of simile, metaphor and euphemism, that this book evaluates.