Sunday, June 13, 2010

What is Laura Penny reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Laura Penny, author of Your Call is Important to Us and More Money Than Brains.

Her entry begins:
I always have a couple of heaps on the go, since both my jobs, teaching and writing, involve grossbuckets of reading and rereading. Here be my heaps, the recently completed and eagerly anticipated, the work-related and leisurely.

Freshly finished work-related stack:

I am fortunate to be part of a terrific program called Halifax Humanities 101, a Clemente great books course. The Clemente program provides a classic, old-school liberal arts curriculum for people who are not usually able to enjoy that sort of thing. The students are unilaterally great. We just finished class, and we like to end up in Canada, so we read some stories by one of my favourites, the amazing Alice Munro. This was also a good excuse to reread the super issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review devoted to her, and to flip through my dogeared copy of Lives of Girls and Women.

This spring I taught a really fun seminar on Walter Benjamin and mass culture, so I've been...[read on]
Laura Penny has taught literature, philosophy, and critical theory at Mount Saint Vincent University, the University of King's College, and Saint Mary's University. She completed her Ph.D in Comparative Literature in 2006. Her dissertation research focused on the relation between the ethical and the aesthetic in the work of Kant, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Deleuze.

Her book Your Call is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit, was published in 2005.

Penny's new book, More Money Than Brains: Why Schools Suck, College is Crap, and Idiots Think They're Right, deals with ignorance, idiocy, and anti-intellectualism.

Writers Read: Laura Penny.

--Marshal Zeringue