Levels of Incompetence: An Academic Life
by Robert Murray Davis
This is an engaging and unusual memoir that is also a cultural analysis and a history of ideas. Davis examines his personal experience of graduate literary studies, tenure, and retirement, then offers an astute analysis of social changes affecting the professional study of literature in the second half of the twentieth century. He concludes with an account of how his own writing shifts to creative nonfiction and cultural commentary.
Order from any bookstore, local or online. This title is also available from Fleur Fine Books of Galveston, Texas.
About the Author
After 45 years of university teaching -- 33 of them at the University of Oklahoma -- Robert Murray Davis retired to Arizona to do freelance writing, consulting, and lecturing, the last mostly in Europe. After four decades of scholarly work on modern English and American fiction, in recent years he has published on Western American literature and culture, on Central European writing, and on his own creative nonfiction. Many of his reviews and critical essays can be found on the World Literature Today website; others at www.tol.cz. See texturepress.org for a link to the online publication of his poem, "Live White Male."