David Charlson
Professor of English
David Charlson
Professor of English
Henry Adams, a nineteenth-century author and teacher, wrote, "The only privilege a student had that was worth claiming was that of talking to the professor, and the professor was bound to encourage it." So I do.
CONTACT INFORMATION: (405) 682-1611, extension 7638, or 3E5 in the Arts and Humanities Building of OCCC. Call me for my current office hours, or e-mail me at djcharlson@occc.edu anytime.
I teach the following courses in English, Literature, and Learning Skills:
My students do some great work. Just follow the links to read their copyrighted efforts on the following: a defense of acupuncture, a true story about an angel, a metaphor-loaded description of hitting a baseball, an exposé of what seems like a consipiracy against breastfeeding, a complaint against cesarean sections, a great football story with a surprise in it, a dizzying real-life connection to Tess Gallagher's poem "The Hug," a day in the life of a martial artist and his "boss," an endorsement of midwives, a memorial to the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing and of a drunk driver, a personal experience with racism, a paragraph on a feeling only snow people know, an argument for putting soy into one's diet, a stepmother essay as good as the recent film, and essays or parts of essays on short stories by Amy Tan and Laurie Colwin and Willa Cather and Kate Chopin.
What have I written? For my master's project in composition and rhetoric at Iowa State University, I wrote INTRODUCTORY ADVICE TO INCOMING FRESHMAN ENGLISH TEACHING ASSISTANTS (1986), an advice manual for new college English teachers. Thanks to one of my students, that document is now digital and available for your perusal. It IS a bit dated, but what the heck; check out it out here if you wish.
I also wrote the chapter on twentieth-century American literature in RECENT STUDIES IN MYTHS AND LITERATURE: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY (Greenwood Press, 1991), and I wrote parts of AN ACADEMIC WRITING GLOSSARY (Writing Program Administrators, 1996), a study of the terms used in the assignment and evaluation of college writing.
Click on the following link to read an abstract of my dissertation on the controversial American author Charles Bukowski, "Charles Bukowski: Autobiographer, Gender Critic, Iconoclast" (University of Kansas, 1995).
Charles Bukowski, 1920-1994
In search of humor and/or poetry? See my "elegy" to John Belushi or my tribute to F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY. Warning: more short poems may arrive someday soon.
Click here to view my curriculum vitae. Thanks for browsing.