Reading, Learning, Teaching James Dickey: (4 Confronting the Text, Confronting the World)

William B. Thesing, James Dickey’s colleague at the University of South Carolina for twenty years, has a unique and complex perspective on the life and writing of this great twentieth-century American author. Dickey offers readers, students, and teachers a variety of energized and imaginative texts, and Thesing provides original and perceptive readings of his life and his novels as well as his most popular poems about animals in nature, man in nature, social and sexual relationships, women, and civilian and wartime death.
This is the only introductory teaching/study guide available on Dickey’s poems and novels. Chapters are conveniently organized around essential thematic categories. The author employs various modern critical approaches – from feminist criticism to deconstruction – to the poems and novels. The book will be useful in college or high school courses on Southern literature, American poetry, and twentieth-century literature.

About the Author :
The Author: William B. Thesing is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of South Carolina where he taught for over thirty years. He holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He has authored or edited fifteen books, and served as editor of the James Dickey Newsletter from 2003-2008. In 1980, his book The London Muse won the SAMLA Studies Book Award. His co-edited (with Theda Wrede) collection of essays, The Way We Read James Dickey, is forthcoming.

Review :
«Thesing’s unique book – part-critical study, part-teaching manual, part-memoir – delivers overlapping aspects of Dickey’s life and work in a manner all its own yet wholly appropriate for one of the twentieth century’s most conflicted and gifted writers. A seasoned reader, veteran teacher, and former colleague of Dickey, Thesing gives us the man he knew even as he draws forth new meanings from his work and – perhaps most importantly – teaches us how to share the best of what he wrote with others.» (Casey Clabough, author of ‘Elements: The Novels of James Dickey’)
«In Thesing’s introductory comments he extends the aim of his book beyond recitation of poems and novels, indicating an approach that embraces a synthesis of ideas as well as an active interpretation well within their historical, geographical, and cultural context. His success dictates that professors, teachers, and students writing about James Dickey and his work will profit by going immediately to this text. Even after years of Dickey scholarship, I find much new and exciting in Professor Thesing’s approach. The fact that this is a textbook, a teacher’s guide to poems and novels, does not preclude a second, or even a third, reading by anyone interested in the poems and novels of James Dickey.» (Joyce M. Pair, Ph.D. English Professor Emerita, DeKalb College, Founding editor: ‘James Dickey Newsletter & James Dickey Society’)