William Rodney Allen, Ph.D., Duke University

rallen@lsmsa.edu

I've been teaching English at LSMSA since 1983, the year the school opened.

Courses with links to syllabi:

English 210

Shakespeare

American Literature

Film Studies

Major Publications:

“If you will it, Dude, it is no dream.”

Walter to The Dude in “The Big Lebowski”

The Coen Brothers: Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006.

“If I had a flair for doing research, I would be doing research.”

Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer

Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

“I’m glad I never killed anybody.”

Kurt Vonnegut, interview with Rodney Allen and Paul Smith

Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988.

“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

Mark Vonnegut, in a letter to his father Kurt, used as epigraph to Bluebeard

Understanding Kurt Vonnegut, Columbia: South Carolina University Press, 1991.

“As Lightening to the Children eased/With explanation kind/The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind--”

Emily Dickinson, poem 1169

The Heath Introduction to Literature, 6th edition, ed. William Rodney Allen and Alice Landy, Boston: D.C. Heath, 2000.

Courses:

 
Evolution and Literature
 
Readings:

Origin of Species, Charles Darwin, 1859

The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins, 1986

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Carl Sagan, 1992

The End of Evolution, Peter Ward, 1994

Inherit the Wind, Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee, 1955

Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut, 1985

Contact, Carl Sagan, 1985

Kurt Vonnegut

Readings:

Mother Night,1961

Cat's Cradle, 1963

Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969

Jailbird, 1979

Palm Sunday, 1981

Bluebeard, 1987

Southern Fiction

Readings:

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner, 1930

Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner, 1936

All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren, 1946

Three by O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor, 1983

The Moviegoer, Walker Percy, 1961

Can't Quit You, Baby, Ellen Douglas, 1988

Walker Percy

Readings:

The Moviegoer, 1961

The Last Gentleman 1966

Love in the Ruins, 1971

Lancelot, 1977

The Second Coming , 1980