Hunter, Allan G. 1955-

views updated

Hunter, Allan G. 1955-

PERSONAL:

Born May 7, 1955, in Beckford, Gloucestershire, England; naturalized U.S. citizen; son of William James (an air force officer) and Elsa (a homemaker) Hunter. Ethnicity: "White Cisalpine Celt." Education: St. John's College, Oxford, B.A., 1976, M.A., 1979, D.Phil., 1983. Politics: "Liberal/Democrat." Religion: Church of England. Hobbies and other interests: Writing novels, restoring motorcycles.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Watertown, MA. Office—English Area, Curry College, Milton, MA 02186. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Teacher of English and French at a school in England, 1976-77; Fairleigh Dickinson University, Oxford Campus, Oxford, England, senior lecturer in English, 1979-83; Peper Harow Therapeutic Community, Surrey, England, staff member, 1983-86; Curry College, Milton, MA, professor of English, 1986—, head of English area, 1987-90, 1993-95. Coordinator of justice program at Cedar Junction maximum security prison in Walpole, 1988-90; University of Massachusetts at Boston, teacher of British and American fiction courses, 1991-93; Cambridge Center for Adult Education, writing teacher, 1997—; private practice as a therapist, using writing for self-exploration; teaches private writing classes; The Essential Indian Motorcycle Resource Book, publisher; guest on media programs. Massachusetts Council on Prison Education, corporation member. Rugby coach and part-time referee.

MEMBER:

Association for Psychological Type.

WRITINGS:

Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinism, Croom Helm (London, England), 1983.

The Therapeutic Uses of Writing, Nova Science (New York, NY), 1996, published as The Sanity Manual, 1999.

Life Passages: Writing Exercises for Self-Exploration, Nova Science (New York, NY), 2000.

How They Met, Xlibris (Philadelphia, PA), 2000.

(Editor) From Coastal Command to Captivity: The Memoir of a Second World War Airman, Pen and Sword (Barnsley, South Yorkshire, England), 2003.

Contributor to books, including A Closer Look, edited by Adelizzi and Goss, CC Press (Milton, MA), 1995. Staff columnist, Shared Visions on Teaching and Learning, 1997—. Contributor of about thirty articles and reviews to academic journals, including Conradiana and Notes and Queries.

SIDELIGHTS:

Allan G. Hunter once told CA: "My self-help books are designed as a series of writing exercises that will allow the reader to be an active participant in the process of self-discovery. The books provide the exercises and the possible ways of assessing the writing the reader may produce. As such they provide the necessary context that allows readers to ‘place’ themselves and to begin further reflections upon who they may be.

"I chose to write self-help volumes when it became clear to me that many people were spending a lot of time writing, and that in very little of this writing were they allowing themselves to emerge—at all. Writing was a chore for them. Rarely were they able to use the activity of writing as a way to access their own wisdom, or to uncover what they already knew but had forgotten to ask for. My aim is to allow writers to acknowledge their own wisdom and their own vision."

Hunter also mentioned his research interests in "Shakespeare's tragic pairings" and in the later fiction of Joseph Conrad. In regard to the former, he commented: "Romeo and Juliet are perfectly paired—they have their own language and sphere of reference. Yet their equality becomes a folie a deux. This tragic inversion of the marriage pairing sheds light on other pairs, or twins, who identify each other throughout the plays. A detailed examination reveals exciting new readings of As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, King Lear, and the last plays." In regard to the latter, Hunter wrote: "The visual element and the ironic use of cliche in Conrad's later novels works against the narrators, with all their linguistic foibles. A picture emerges of Conrad as a visually stimulated author, a character within the work, a provider of information trapped in the limitation of his own language—an act of which he allows his narrators to be only partially aware."

More recently Hunter added: "From Coastal Command to Captivity: The Memoir of a Second World War Airman is a memoir of my father's wartime experiences in the Royal Air Force, his time as a prisoner of war, and his release in 1945 after nearly four years of captivity in such places as Stalag Luft III. When he died, after we had been working on his memoir together for a decade, my father left the papers to me to complete. This explains why the finished memoir is attributed to me as author. Working on his life story allowed my father to reach a place of peace about events that had traumatized him for fifty years. It was, one could say, therapeutic writing at its most useful. It's also a valuable tale for any reader."