Amanda Sparrow

Dr. David Stubblefield is an Associate Professor of English at Southern Wesleyan University. Stubblefield has earned both a B.A. and an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of South Carolina, and he earned his Ph.D. in English Composition and Rhetoric from the same institution. Dr. Stubblefield is Senior Editor for the Carolina Institute for Faith and Culture. 

ME: Where were you born?

STUBBLEFIELD: Evansville, Indiana.

ME: How was it growing up there?

STUBBLEFIELD: Flat. I moved to Cincinnati  in 2nd grade so I don’t remember a whole lot.

ME: Did you move a lot?

STUBBLEFIELD: Twice, I guess, twice before I was eighteen. I moved from Cincinnati in the second grade and I moved to Spartanburg at thirteen. So that was the big move, that was much different.

ME: Tell me about your family.

STUBBLEFIELD: I’m in the middle, I’ve got a brother and sister.

ME: Me, too. I’ve got two brothers

STUBBLEFIELD: Oh, okay, I like middle children, generally. My dad was a mechanical engineer and my mother was stay at home mother and a very committed Christian. She took the kids to all the lessons, not exactly a helicopter mom, but very committed. My  brother and sister are both professors. In general, we were a very close family, preferring to be around each other to being around our friends.

ME: It runs in the family then, I guess.

STUBBLEFIELD: I guess, but we weren’t really pushed academically. I think it was because my dad always made us listen to Bob Dylan and I had every hit, every song, memorized by age twelve. And we never got spanked or physically punished; we had to give some long account of our lives, which was often much more painful. Sometimes they lasted a few hours, so I think that it was sort of a very painful humanities exercise. These are the only two reasons that I can think of as to why we all went into humanities.

I might add one more thing: my Dad’s freedom talk. My dad wanted discussion, a kind of 1960s thing. He thought it was important. Sometimes he irritated my mom with his “freedom talk”. He said he tried to treat us like little adults, like we had opinions. But we always stressed some existential sense of freedom and pushed us to think about this.

ME: Do you have any hobbies or talents?

STUBBLEFIELD: Well, since I’ve gotten into this, it’s so time consuming… Family is a hobby. And exercise, I try to exercise seven days a week. I try to take Sundays off, but it’s kind of addictive. It’s like, you need that to concentrate and calm down. I’ve started following politics closer than I want to, so that’s a hobby. I used play classical piano, but I haven’t had it for  awhile. I always think I’ll get back to it, but I’m not sure that will happen. My dad begs me, but we’ll see.

ME: How long have you been teaching and what made you pursue it?

STUBBLEFIELD: When did it start? When I was working on my Masters in Philosophy, it was 2006… 10 years? I strictly wanted to keep doing what I was doing, at first, and teaching would allow me to do that. I really just wanted to keep doing what I was doing. I wasn’t somebody who went into it for teaching. I just wanted to keep reading and keep learning and, oh yeah, I was going to have to teach. And I hoped that it would come later, you know? Teaching was the way to stay in academia.

ME: What originally interested you in Philosophy?

STUBBLEFIELD: Well, I consider myself self-educated. I had a grudge against school because I was dyslexic and things did not go well early. However, in my late twenties, I had a friend who asked me to take a class with him in Philosophy and read all the books that he was reading. So I did and eventually sat in the graduate class he was taking. Looking back, I was not supposed to be there. I did not know any better, but I am kind of surprised my fried suggested this.

Anyway, I was also surprised that they were actually thinking critically, because I thought it was conformity, and I really clicked with this class on Michelle Foucault, a French philosopher, who wrote about the connection between power and knowledge, something I felt that I had wrestled with my whole life, but I never really heard anyone articulate high-level ideas.  I mean I had an intuition about certain things, and Foucault was both explaining this intuition and challenging it.

Anyway, And I started doing a lot better–getting up early in the morning, becoming very focused. In a sense, it centered me. My dad always told me when I get bored, I get in trouble. So finding this new interest protected me from ever getting bored.  Basically, I just wanted to keep doing it, that was my only reason for going to school.The only reason I ever bought into to grades and wanted my teachers to advance me was really so I would not have to quit. Also, when I attended the class,  I thought Foucault’s writing was falling on deaf ears. I didn’t have any experience, but I really thought I understood something about what he was trying to say. I had a kind of stake in it. However, to other students, it was just something they had to read, which I understand… Even though I didn’t fully understand the texts and, looking back, was clearly “wrong” about some of his work, everything was firing and I thought that the other students didn’t get it.

ME: I feel like that happens often in the humanities, something just connects with you and [you] can’t explain it.

STUBBLEFIELD: For a while, I just took my lFoucault books and went to the bottom of Blue Sky Coffeehouse after work, and the lights started coming on in the morning before I went to work, and that’s all I cared about for a while. I liked that kind of freedom. There was liberating for you. I know longer needed entertainment. It’s kind of [a] place of your own and for some reason, you don’t know why, something takes ahold of you.

ME: Yeah, my parents’ friends are always asking me if I’m going to be a teacher because they think nothing else is out there for an English degree.

STUBBLEFIELD: Well, you’ve got a lot of options. I didn’t go back to school until I was almost thirty. I don’t regret that I was out of school for a long time. I see some people that weren’t and it’s a very narrow take on things. It’s [as if] this person was never out of school, because there is a bubble. Like at USC there’s all kinds of diversity and there’s all kinds of acceptance and you start to think this is the rest of the world is. It’s a privileged area with the energy of people bettering themselves.

ME: What is your favorite book? Only one and why?

STUBBLEFIELD: Different books at different times. Georgio Agamben. He’s an Italian philosopher. It’s actually called Homo Sacer. Agamben, yeah, that’s my Skype name, too. Why? Because it looks at the connection between language, law and violence. And it explains human existence in a lot of ways to me and how the world around me works. That was the perspective that I find very valuable. It’s my default way of thinking. If I start writing something, Agamben’s work usually starts to come out because I’ve read it so many times.

ME: What piece of work have you written or researched that you are most proud of?

STUBBLEFIELD: I wrote a paper that I hope to get published about language and death. That was a problem that I thought about since I was a small child when I had an odd experience. When I read Maurice Blanchot, I said, I can’t believe he is talking about this. I didn’t think anybody thought about this type of thing. I was just shocked and amazed that I could write a paper on something that had confounded me for over thirty years. And I needed the help from the reading I did. I wasn’t able to get at that it myself. So the research clarified something that I thought was beyond clarification. But the paper still needs work.

ME: Have you ever had a mentor in your life (professor, friend) who influenced you?

STUBBLEFIELD: I think the one that comes to mind most is John Muckelbauer. He had reading groups at his house every Monday from 8:00 to midnight, so it was about four hours, with about four or five of us. He really was very generous with his time and we read very important very difficult text and we just opened the book and just read for four or five hours sometimes. That experience was very good. He’s very good at what he does and the way he thinks. He’s one of the voices in my head when I am writing. What would John think about this? So his voice is in there more than any of them, I think.

ME: You have your Bachelor’s and Master’s in Philosophy. What made you interested in obtaining a PhD in English Rhetoric?

STUBBLEFIELD: I was interested in French and German Philosophy which tends to go into literary theory and English departments. I guess people told me that the place for me to go would be in English and, also, the job prospects are, like, a hundred times better. There’s 120 sections of [English] 101 and 102, whereas there might be eight or ten Philosophy classes. Everybody said there will be no risk.

ME: You see that often in the humanities, I think.

STUBBLEFIELD: Yeah, how do you get a guy with a PhD off your porch? Buy a magazine subscription from him.

ME: Being in one of your classes right now, you bring a lot a Philosophy to the table. It seems as though you have a pretty unique lens.

STUBBLEFIELD: I think it always ends up going that way. I think if you can get people thinking, even in a Composition class, the skills will follow. If you can get them interested and thinking, I think the performance will come. Where if you strictly try to give them a skill, they’re [liable] to not be interested.

ME: So, how’s it going teaching Comp classes?

STUBBLEFIELD: It’s the most challenging class, it is. It’s a very important class. It’s something that I’m always trying to improve upon. It’s really the blue collar job of the University, it’s constant grading. I like it, teaching Comp is a challenge in a lot of ways. I like it. I want to get better at it. Thinking about totally redoing the way I did it last time and just get them writing every day, whether it’s about what you want to major, your experience in high school… Just to ramp it up, to get them where they just don’t dread writing. The problem is there’s a big disparity. Some are making A’s the first time, some can barely write an essay, all in your class. So you try to hit the middle. I tend to try to get the lower ones in my Comp class, because I think the higher ones will probably be okay, but you can make a difference with the others. I shoot a little lower; I think it’s the right thing to do. I think I’m probably the only one who looks at it that way.

ME: What is your dissertation about?

STUBBLEFIELD: It’s been hard. It’s sort of shifting right now. The role of error in writing. I’m able to get a lot out of that, a simple topic. In general I want to say that we’ve shifted the error from grammar to content is what we’re doing now. It’s brought about a type of political correctness. And that’s what’s happening with this and we have to try to combat that. The hardest thing about the dissertation is they make you write a prospectus first, in which you outline the entire project and everybody has to sign on it. And I’ve never wrote a single paper in my whole life like that. I never knew what I was going to write before I wrote it. And I don’t think I’ll ever have to do it again. What’s been the most frustrating part of it is you have to have the entire thing planned and some people just don’t work like that. Nothing I’ve ever done was in that way so it’s been hard. Anyway, I like it, but I’ll be glad when it’s done.