Blake Hobby

Director of Honors

Contact information:
Office: KH140
Phone: 251-6607

bhobby@unca.edu

http://facstaff.unca.edu/bhobby

Recent teaching:

ARTS 310 Arts and Ideas

LANG 120 Foundations of Academic Writing

HUM 324 The Modern World

LIT 446 James Joyce

LIT 373 Postmodern American Literature

LIT 373 Postwar American Writers

LIT 373 Nobel Prizewinners

MLA 520 The Human Condition

Personal Statement:

 I'm a recovering Joyceaholic.  Lured by James Joyce's dense prose and comic wit, I spent several years (it's all a blur now) saddled up to the Ormond Bar, where, from an ideal spot near Lydia Douce's beer-pull, I watched Poldy Bloom eat, drink, and listen to music.  Sausage, kidneys, Guinness, outhouses, Irish Karaoke.  Need I say more?  I now love teaching writing and literature, reading current fiction and nonfiction, performing harpsichord music of the 17th and 18th centuries, doing web design, and exploring online learning.  Although I specialize in modernism, modern British, contemporary American literature and Native American literature, interdisciplinary approaches to literature, and critical theory, I'm also interested in philosophy, biblical literature, theology, aesthetics, pop. culture, and technology.  I'm very happy to be here at UNCA.  It's a great place with many wonderful people.

Currently, I am editing The Student's Encyclopedia of Great American Writers 1945-1970 for Facts on File. I am writing chapters for the encyclopedia on Gwendolyn Brooks, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Sylvia Plath, and Kurt Vonnegut. Recent publications include chapters on Ben Okri and Keri Hulme for volume 326 of The Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Merrritt Moseley, entries on Alan Shapiro and Charles Johnson for the Encyclopedia of Ethnic American Literature, entries on Gloria Bird and Mourning Dove for the Encyclopedia of Native American Literature, entries on Andre Gide and three of his novels for the Compendium of 20th Century Novel, an article entitled "American Consumption and Academic Production in Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy's" for Magazine Americana, an article entitled "Created Sick, Commanded to be Sound: Point Counter Point's Self-Referential Wordmusic" for the Dalkey Archive Press Casebook Studies series, and an article on Buddhism in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage to be published in a 2007 volume on Religion and Public Life.