Dr. Michael DiSanto

English at Algoma University

Overview

Dr. Michael DiSantoHonours BA, First Class (Brock University)
MA (Dalhousie University)
PhD (Dalhousie University)

Michael studies literature and philosophy of the long nineteenth century (1789 to 1914). He reads the novel as criticism, especially the ways in which the works of Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence revalue, combat, and extend the art and thought of their intellectual and literary predecessors including George Eliot and Friedrich Nietzsche, among others.

Michael is the author of Under Conrad's Eyes: The Novel as Criticism (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009). He was the co-editor of The New Compass: A Critical Review. He has contributed articles to The Dalhousie Review, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Nineteenth-Century Prose, and The Cambridge Quarterly. With Brian Crick, he edited a selection of D.H. Lawrence's criticism, the third volume in a series that includes collections of essays by Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, all published by Edgeways Books at www.edgewaysbooks.com.

Currently, he is working on new collections of the poetry and the critical essays of George Whalley (1915-83), the eminent and accomplished Canadian man of letters. In addition, he proposes to publish a collection of Whalley’s letters home from war (1939-45) and later a biography. In connection with preparing a scholarly edition of Whalley’s poetry, which includes a significant body of work written during World War II, Michael has joined Editing Modernism in Canada.

He teaches courses in the Eighteenth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, the Eighteenth-Century Novel, the Nineteenth-Century Novel, the Modern Novel, and the History of Literary Criticism.

 

Teaching Philosophy

I encourage students to engage in critical conversations that include the works we read and the culture in which we live. Through ongoing concurrent dialogues involving works of literature, critical texts, students' essays, and class discussions, I ask students to become increasingly aware of their own use of language and the writing and speaking of others. I challenge students to become alert to the implications of different ideas for our thinking and living as individuals and in a culture as a whole. The importance of recognizing and understanding the relationships among conflicting and competing perspectives, individual, political, cultural, disciplinary, and otherwise, is a major consideration in my teaching. To improve our critical judgement we must understand the ideas and values that inform different arguments in order to understand the value of our own. I hope my students will understand that criticism is not only practiced on written works, but also directed at our fundamental assumptions and the relationship between our values and those of other individuals and cultures. Rather than simply educate students to read poems and novels, I want to help them learn how to exercise their critical judgement in their life outside of the classroom in response to the many competing demands their life will make upon them. In short, I emphasize the continuities between the thinking that occurs when reading and discussing literature in the classroom and in our living as a whole.