Dr. Lance La Rocque
Position: Associate Professor
Office: BAC 429
Phone: 902-585-1146
Email: lance.larocque@acadiau.ca
Research interests: Early 20th Century Experimental Art & Poetry, Modern Poetry, Philosophies, Fantasies, and Ideologies of Nature, Marshal McLuhan and Communication Technologies, Hemingway,
Teaching: All the upper level courses are discussion-based, involve class presentations, an essay and a longer project of your own design (or a longer, traditional essay). I either have an exam or a journal. There are numerous texts (but these are mostly poems, a few articles, and perhaps a short novel). There are often creative components.
Selected Publications: “Breathing Books, Deranged Bodies, Reading and Writing Landscapes in the Poetry of Harry Thurston" (Isle 2003), Utopian Counter-Discourses in ‘Big Two-Hearted River’” with Lisa Narbeshuber (The Hemingway Review. Forthcoming Fall 2022). Creative works include Vermin (Bookthug 2011) and Glitch (a chapbook Above/Ground Press 2020).
Courses Recently Taught: “The Writer and Nature” (1 and 2) explores theories, fantasies, and experimental modes of engagement with nature. I am interested in researching the idea of nature in a conventional sense (Thoreau, Hemingway, Atwood) but also in unconventional ways, as it appears or disappears in modernist woks (Italian Futurism, dada, and surrealist art, for example). I am also interested in how experimental art and poetry of the early twentieth century rethinks the relationship between mind, body, technology, and community. In the course “Experimental Poetry” I am interested in exploring such intersections and also how such works (of futurism, dada, surrealism, etc.) create the tools for new ways of experiencing the world.