An interview with Paul Binding

Paul Binding is a British writer who has worked in many fields: he is a literary critic, novelist, reviewer and renowned expert in Scandinavian literature. His novels are Harmonica’s Bridegroom (1984, recently reprinted by Valancourt Books), Kingfisher Weather (1989), My Cousin the Writer (2002) and After Brock (2013). He has given lectures at universities and participated in cultural events in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Estonia. His memoir St Martin’s Ride, which focuses on his childhood in Germany soon after the end of the Second World War, was Sir Stephen Spender’s Book of the Year, and was awarded the J.R. Ackerley Prize for the best autobiographical book of 1990. He has frequently spent long periods abroad, and his time in Jackson, Mississipi as a visiting professor led to The Still Moment: Eudora Welty, Portrait of a Writer (1994). The book draws on the many conversations he had with Welty about her work. More recently, he published Imagined Corners: Exploring the World’s First Atlas (2003). He has frequently reviewed books for the Times Literary Supplement and The Independent. His most recent book is Hans Christian Andersen: European Witness (2014), which was very well reviewed and described by Amanda Craig in the Literary Review as his best work yet. An in-depth and wide-ranging literary biography, it sets Andersen’s work within a European context and pays close attention to his unjustly neglected work outside the fairy tales, such as the novel Improvisatore, which Binding argues was a great influence on Charles Dickens. I met and became friends with Paul through our mutual interest in the novelist Barbara Pym, and have since had many discussions with him about writers; he was the plenary speaker at the Barbara Pym Centenary Conference I organised in 2013. He lives in the beautiful small town of Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire, in the Welsh Marches – the border country of England and Wales. His website is http://www.paulbinding.co.uk/index.html

The Impact of the Internet on Retail Competition: Evidence from Technological Differences in Internet Access

Does the internet increase competition? To address this question, I exploit two institutional details unique to Germany: (1) Some municipalities received glass fibre cables that cannot be upgraded to DSL; I use these municipalities as a treatment group with reduced online competition. (2) German law mandates resale price maintenance for books; I compare three retailing sectors, electronics (price competition), books (no price competition), and food (no online sales), to identify the effect of price competition: The effect of price competition is highly significant. Full broadband access reduces offline electronics retailers’ producer rents by 1.5 percent per year from 1999 to 2007

She reads, he reads: gender differences and learning through self-help books

Despite considerable scholarly attention given to self-help literature, there has been a lack of research about the experience of self-help reading. In this article, we explore gender differences in self-help reading. We argue that men and women read self-help books for different reasons and with different levels of engagement, and that they experience different outcomes from reading. We provide evidence from in-depth interviews with 89 women and 45 men. Women are more likely to seek out books of their own volition, to engage in learning strategies beyond reading, and to take action as a result of reading. Men are more likely to read books relating to careers, while women are more likely to read books about interpersonal relationships. We argue that these gender differences reflect profound political-economic and cultural changes, and that such changes also help explain the gendered evolution of adult, continuing, and higher education in recent decades. (DIPF/Orig.

Library Research Instruction for Doctor of Ministry Students: Outcomes of Instruction Provided by a Theological Librarian and by a Program Faculty Member

At some seminaries the question of who is more effective teaching library research is an open question. There are two camps of thought: (1) that the program faculty member is more effective in providing library research instruction as he or she is intimately engaged in the subject of the course(s), or 2) that the theological librarian is more effective in providing library research instruction as he or she is more familiar with the scope of resources that are available, as well as how to obtain “hard to get” resources

Archway Commencement Issue, May 2002

2002 Archway Commencement Issu

The N-Word: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned

In the fall of 2008, I dared to teach a fifteen-week course that focused on a single word, a word arguably like no other, a word adorned with these emotionally colorful descriptors: “the most explosive of racial epithets,” “our cruelest word,” “the most toxic in the English language,” “the most troubling word in our language,” “almost magical in its negative power,” “six simple letters that convey centuries of pain, evil and contempt,” “an almost universally known word of contempt,” “occupies a place in the soul where logic and reason never go,” and “the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language.” I have since taught the course three more times. Because of the overwhelming success of my multimedia and multi-genre undergraduate course, “The N-word: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned,” both for my students and for me, and because of the peculiar and alleged post-racial American historical moment in which we now are living with the first African American U.S. President, this reflective pedagogical piece, “The N-Word: Lessons taught and Lessons Learned,” is particularly relevant and timely. Indeed, although the use and history of the “nigger” with its various interracial, intraracial, and intracultural associations have garnered public attention in American classrooms, in the American media, and in American popular culture, deeper implications surrounding this word, the word “nigger” has not had the kind of sustained classroom exploration my semester -long course afforded. Putting this single word under a critical microscope underscored for me and my students the fact that ideas about language and identity, about language and public performance, and about language and American race relations inextricably connect youths and elders, blacks and whites, males and females, children and adults, the international and the domestic, past and present, public and private, and the personal and the political. Specifically, this pedagogical reflection offers a social and political context for the course, an intellectual rationale for the course, specific and detailed course content, students’ responses to the course, students\u27 and teacher\u27s overarching lessons gleaned from the course, and bibliographic suggestions for classroom practitioners and critically curious others navigating the ocean of materials on the word that journalist Farai Chideya has called “the all-American trump card, the nuclear bomb of racial epithets.”