Scholar’s Symposium: The Work of David Carr

Excerpt

I am grateful to the program committee of SPEP for organizing the session from which these papers are drawn. It is an honor to be recognized in this way by an organization to which I’ve belonged since its (and my) struggling earliest days, which I’ve served as an officer in past years, and to which I always return for its reliably outstanding programs and for the opportunity to see old and new friends. The session itself was lively and enjoyable, and I’m grateful to all those who attended, and to my former student, Prof. Margret Grebowicz, who with characteristic humor and good grace kept things from getting out of hand. In the following we cannot recapture the immediacy of that discussion, but at least I have the opportunity to put my own rather rambling responses into intelligible form. Or so I hope. I could not have wished for a more stellar or capable panel than my three colleagues Casey, Crowell, and Kearney. They all belong to the phenomenological tradition, but their work illustrates beautifully what a wide variety of interests and styles that tradition has come to include. Each looks at my work from a different angle and with different concerns in mind. In the following papers they have some very kind things to say, and for these I am grateful. But most important, they have paid my work the ultimate compliment of taking it seriously and subjecting it to rigorous critical scrutiny. In the process they reveal some serious weaknesses, some of which I was already aware of, some of which are new to me. In the following responses I try to meet the challenge of their remarks and learn from their criticisms. If I am successful, my future work will be improved as a result. …