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Brett Bourbon received his B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, where he studied medieval philosophy and theology, and his Ph.D. from Harvard, where he studied modern philosophy and literature. He has been a professor at Stanford University, and is now an English professor at the University of Dallas.
He has received many awards, including a Fulbright to the University of Lisbon, a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship, the Harvard English Scholar award, and the Walter J. Gores Teaching award from Stanford.
His philosophical work ranges from the philosophy of language and mind to aesthetics and ethics. In particular, he has studied the philosophical grammar of sense and nonsense, the logical form of fiction, the nature of poems, the question of poetic experience and truth, and various problems in politics and ethics.
While he is an expert in the work of James Joyce, he has also taught and written on the art of Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and on contemporary poems and novels [both British and American]. In addition, he has a fanatical love for the poetry of Homer and Dante.
Ph.D., Harvard
B.A., UC Berkeley
Brett Bourbon, Ph.D. was a professor at Stanford University for ten years, and is now an English professor at the University of Dallas. In addition, he is a Visiting Associate Professor in The Program of Literary Theory at the University of Lisbon.
Brett Bourbon, Ph.D. is also the Strategy and Technology consultant at the Silicon Valley Insight and Design firm of Slanted Light. He has worked on consulting projects, involving strategic and technological issues, for Microsoft, Nike and a host of start-ups.
Literary Tradition I, II
Modernism
Literary Study II: Prose Fiction
Brett Bourbon is the author of Finding a Replacement for the Soul: Meaning and Mind in Literature and Philosophy (Harvard UP, 2004). He has also written and published numerous essays, including essays on the concept of culture, the philosophy of Wittgenstein, science fiction, the theory and practice of poetry, and James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.
He has recently completed a manuscript, entitled An Art of Attention: Poems, Ethics, and the Rationality of Description. He is currently working on a book entitled, The Logic and Poetry of Analogy, as well as a collection of essays, entitled The Senses of War and Culture.
