Porter Abbott on Teaching and the University
From UCSB English Department Knowledge Base
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Professor H. Porter Abbott (Emeritus) discusses his 40+ years of experience teaching at UCSB.
Introduction: Background and Career
Ryan Boyd: "My name is Ryan Boyd, and on behalf of the UCSB English Department and our new Wikipedia-style English Department Knowledge Database, I'm here with [Professor] Porter Abbott to talk a little bit about teaching. Porter, I was wondering if you could talk about your educational background, courses you've taught over the years, research interests, and what not."
Porter Abbott: "To go way back: I failed kindergarten. I was a terrible student for a long time. The great break was getting into Reed College, which I absolutely loved and adored: it taught me a great deal. Most of what we did there was argue, and I stress this because it has been an assumption of mine, sometimes a mistaken assumption in my teaching career, that students would like to argue. In my family, when I was growing up, we always argued at dinner.
"I went to the University of Toronto for my M.A. and Ph.D., and then I came here, and have been here for forty-two years, and I'm now retired--occasionally teaching. I started out as a Modernist: I've written, for example, two books on Samuel Beckett. But I think the slow, gradual change in my principal focus began with a book I wrote on the diary-strategy in fiction and published, I think, in 1983 [Diary Fiction: Writing as Action]. And this led me, naturally, into what I didn't know at the time was the field of narrative. This interest has simply accelerated. I developed a course, Introduction to Narrative, and out of that came a book, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, which will come out in its second edition in April."
RB: "So you've published four full books?"
PA: "I've published four, plus this second edition, plus a special double-issue of SubStance called "On the Origin of Fictions.” This project came out of another interest of mine in evolution and cognition. I think I can say that I am as happy now, or happier, than I have ever been in my life, at least in my research area. It's as exciting as it's ever been, and I'm in with a really great bunch of very smart people in the narrative business. So, you see, there's life after retirement, in fact, a bit too much life sometimes."
Page 1 of interview
Interview Date: February 18, 2008
Conducted by Ryan Boyd
