How it might have been

MA in December 1991. Read for qualifying exams in 1993 Take exams in January 1994, get flustered on fourth day, have to retake one written section. Propose dissertation, a phenomenological account of reasoning as applied to the formation of a mental image, apprehension of metaphor. Such is the ground for the trope of enargeia in Renaissance poetics; diverge radically from Krieger's account. Finish dissertation in 2001. MLA job list hopeless. Convert first half of dissertation into first book: Dialectic and Rhetoric in Aristotle. One enargeia chapter placed in PMLA. With book 1/4 finished, go into 2003 job market; discover that "rhetoric" in dissertation title makes me look like a compositionist. Receive two offers of 4-5-4 composition from obscure state campuses. Decide that, like the man in the joke, it's either composition or death by composition. Decline offers.

Reality returns to where I really was in 2004.

How it might have been, part II

In my previous post, I suggested that in an alternate life, I would have been faced with a dilemma in 2004: take a hideous composition job or leave the profession. I have remembered a simple solution: take a postdoc. But, you ask, what would happen when the postdoc was no longer renewed? By this time, we would have reached 2006. The answer is that, our earthly labors completed, Beth and I would be carried up into the air in a chariot driven by sixteen winged basset hounds. There, we would be constellated, as were the heroes of old; my four stars would form a table, and her six stars would form a chair. Together, we would be known as "The Furniture."