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Ben McCorkle, English

Posted on | March 17, 2010 | 2,225 views |

Ben McCorkle is an assistant professor of English at OSU Marion. His areas of interest include rhetorical theory, digital media studies and visual culture. He lives in Columbus and has a basement full of old Macs.

What are your five favorite books and why?
I’m sure if I spent any amount of time thinking about this, my list would change several times over, so I’ll just go with my gut: Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs; Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams; Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Céline; and Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

I first encountered most of these books during my formative years (late teens/early 20s), and they’ve held up pretty well for me since then. Now that I think of it, most of these deal with fairly dark themes like violence and drug addiction and abject poverty, but even so, I turned out pretty even-keeled after reading them.

Who is your favorite character (villain or hero) in literature?
I don’t know about my favorite per se, but since I started pondering that question, I kept coming back to Julien Sorel from Stendahl’s The Red and the Black. He’s not really a villain or a hero, but a failure at both. He’s incredibly smart, a Latin prodigy from a humble rural background who aspires to live the aristocratic life in 19th century Parisian high society. He’s really not cut out for it at all. He’s actually kind of a cad, but not even the likable kind of cad.

What is the last book you’ve bought?
Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet, And How to Stop It. I’m not sure I would want to actually stop the Internet, but I sure am interested in what its future looks like.

What’s your “guilty pleasure” – a book you love but don’t often talk about because it’s not “serious” literature?
I’ll proudly own up to it: Cory Doctorow’s recent novel Little Brother was great. It’s actually considered young adult fiction, so it’s geared more to an adolescent audience, but Doctorow puts together a great tale of youth in revolt for the digital age. It deals with a lot of pressing issues currently affecting digital culture: Privacy, copyright, data security, technologies of surveillance, over-reaching governmental institutions and so on.

What “important book” have you not read and why haven’t you read it?
Up until grad school, I had intentionally never read Melville’s Moby Dick.  I’m not entirely sure why, except that it somehow involved this misguided notion that the book represented the epitome of the literary canon, and at the time I was railing against all of that. I finally did read the novel in an American Lit survey, and I was glad I did (and also a little miffed with myself for not reading it sooner).

What book would you most want your kids to read? What would you want them NOT to read?
Well, I currently don’t have children, but I can guarantee you that no kid of mine will be cracking open any of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga while living under my roof. Glittery vampires? Bah. I will, however, put a copy of Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide in his or her little hands as soon as possible because you can never be TOO careful. And I guess I’d push them some A.A. Milne (the Winnie-the-Pooh guy) just so they can retain some of their childhood innocence.

What classic novel was a disappointment to you?
As someone who likes Mark Twain, especially The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I never quite warmed up to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. As a character, Tom just can’t carry a novel like Huck can — he’s not quite complex enough. Also, there’s not enough rafting for my taste in this one.

What books have helped you most in your career?
Just to offer a couple: Remediation, by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, about how media forms evolve over time in our culture, and Kathleen Welch’s Electric Rhetoric, which argues that we need to consider how electronic and digital technologies reshape rhetorical practice.

What are some of your favorite Web sites?
Of course, I follow several academic sites, blogs of colleagues and various databases related to my field, but I also tend to read a lot of blogs about Web culture, gadgets, politics, comics and bicycling. BoingBoing, Gizmodo, The Comics Curmudgeon and Slashdot are four that immediately spring to mind, but there are many others. Many, many others.

BookTalk highlights the literary opinions of faculty and staff at Ohio State. To nominate a colleague for a future BookTalk, e-mail Julia Harris at harris.587@osu.edu

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