Tew, Philip 1954–

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Tew, Philip 1954–

PERSONAL: Born February 17, 1954, in Enfield, Middlesex, England; married Caroline Patti McAlister, June 26, 1976 (divorced May 8, 1981); children: George Alister. Ethnicity: "Londoner." Education: University of Leicester, B.A. (with honors), 1976, M.Phil., 1986; Leicester Polytechnic, postgraduate certificate of education, 1977; University of Westminster, Ph.D., 1997. Politics: "Lapsed anarchist." Religion: "Gnostic/spiritualist." Hobbies and other interests: Cycling, swimming, television, pubs and restaurants.

ADDRESSES: Office—School of English, University of Central England, Perry Barr., Birmingham B42 2SU, England. E-mail—[email protected]; [email protected].

CAREER: Writer and educator. Schoolteacher in Leicestershire and London, England, 1977–82; English teacher at secondary school in London, 1982–90; University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, England, senior lecturer in English and American studies and section head for American literature, 1990–94; Tufts University, Medford, MA, tutor at University College London, 1995–97; University of Westminster, Westminster, England, visiting lecturer in English and American literature and creative writing, 1994–2000; University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary, senior lecturer, 2000–01, honorary reader, beginning 2001; Szeged University, Szeged, Hungary, visiting British Council tutor in English literature, 2000–01; University of Central England, Birmingham, reader in English and aesthetics. Freelance television researcher and producer, 1997–2001. United Kingdom Network for Modern Fiction Studies, director.

MEMBER: Royal Society of Arts (fellow), North East Modern Languages Association.

WRITINGS:

B.S. Johnson: A Critical Reading, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2001.

(Editor, with Rod Mengham and Richard Lane, and contributor) Contemporary British Fiction Post-1979: A Critical Introduction, Polity Press (Cambridge, England), 2003.

The Contemporary British Novel, Continuum (London, England), 2004.

Contributor to books, including Focus: Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Maria Kurdi, Gabriella Hartvig, and Andrew C. Rouse, University of Pecs Press, 2000; Beckett and Philosophy, edited by Richard J. Lane, Palgrave (London, England), 2002; Pastiches, Parodies, and Other Imitations, edited by Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts, and Sjef Houppermans, Rodopi (New York, NY), 2002; The City of Dreadful Night, by James Thomson, Agraphia (London, England), 2003; and After Postmodernism, de Gruyter (New York, NY), 2003. Coeditor of book series "The New British Novel," for Palgrave Macmillan. Contributor to periodicals, including Review of Contemporary Fiction, Critical Survey, Hungarian Journal for English and American Studies, and New Formations: Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Jim Crace, a monograph, for Manchester University Press; editing British Fiction Today, with Rod Mengham, Continuum (London, England), completion expected in 2006.

SIDELIGHTS: Philip Tew told CA: "The primary motivation for writing must be to inform readers and try to inspire them to think critically in an engaged fashion, seeing literary texts in relation to life-world experiences. Among my other motivations is a desire to reflect a meta-realist and theoretical understanding of literary exegesis, avoiding and opposing the relativism of postmodernism. Overall the intention is to engage an ideological understanding of literary texts and contexts that is nevertheless illuminating. I am committed to bringing to the fore neglected and unfashionable authors, critics, and ways of reading. I remain opposed to conservative critics who wish to respect the literary text so that it may simply speak for itself, which of course is paradoxical since any text opens a paradoxical space that invites its interrogation, without simply being one relativistic version of plural means that cannot be either judged or situated. All texts, literary or factual, are at least residually contextual and may be judged by value systems.

"Who or what particularly influences my work? For helping me to understand the philosophic and exegetical contexts of literature, such critics and theorists as Matthew Arnold, F.R. Leavis, Ernst Cassirer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jurgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Edward Pols, and Roy Bhaskar. Also, some fairly obvious Anglo-American literary figures such as William Shakespeare, Laurence Sterne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, Thomas Hardy, Katharine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, B.S. Johnson, Muriel Spark, and the contemporary British writers Jonathan Coe, Jim Crace, Jenny Diski, and Will Self, since they all inspire me to think creative fiction enhances our experience and mutual self-knowledge (intersubjectivity).

"My writing process is at times laborious, but at others transcendent. I find criticism can be creative or at the very least challenging. I remain in some senses a frustrated novelist who finds ideological possibilities in literary criticism. I work fairly assiduously through texts, but I have been known to read them backwards. One piece of advice I offer to students that comes from my own dialectical thinking is that, if an exegetical idea will not go anywhere, or is not persuasive, just try its opposite and see what that suggests to you. I am conscious that one should not simply be descriptive of literary texts, since people are capable of reading primary literary texts themselves, and most of them are not that complicated!

"What inspired me to write on the subjects I have chosen? First, it is the dialectical possibilities that the primary texts offer, and the understandings of life. Alternatively, it is because people ask me to, and something attracts me. In terms of critical writing, I think in some ways I find an impulse from a necessity to balance recent intellectual thought, in that some of us had to resist the extremities and stupidities of the poststructuralist and postmodernist period of thought that for some strange reason dominated the humanities until the end of the last century from about 1980. I still maintain that literature informs and is informed by life, not simply languages."