Touponce, William F. 1948-

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Touponce, William F. 1948-

PERSONAL: Born August 7, 1948, in Pittsfield, MA; son of Mary Louise (Fague) Touponce; married Julie Chang (divorced January 1, 1999); children: Dorothy, Nathan. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Hampshire College, B.A., 1974; University of Massachusetts at Amherst, M.A., 1977, Ph.D., 1981. Politics: Independent. Religion: Orthodox Christian.

ADDRESSES: Home—4617 Cavendish Rd., Indianapolis, IN 46220. Office—Department of English, Institute for American Thought, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, 902 W. New York St., ES 0010, Indianapolis, IN 46202-5157; fax: 317-274-2170. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer. Tamkang University, Tamsui, Taiwan, assistant professor of comparative literature, 1981–84; Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, Indianapolis, assistant professor, 1985–90, associate professor, 1990–97, professor of English, 1998–, director of professional editing at Institute for American Thought, 2004–. Public speaker; guest on television programs. Military service: U.S. Army, 1967–70; served in Vietnam; received Air Medal and Army Commendation Medal.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America, Children's Literature Association, Science Fiction Research Association, Popular Culture Association.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fellow of National Endowment for the Humanities at University of Connecticut, 1985.

WRITINGS:

Ray Bradbury and the Poetics of Reverie: Fantasy, Science Fiction, and the Reader, UMI Research Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1984, revised edition, Borgo (San Bernardino, CA), 1998.

Frank Herbert, G. K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1988.

Ray Bradbury, Starmont House (Mercer Island, WA), 1989.

Isaac Asimov, G. K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1991.

(With Jonathan R. Eller) Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, Kent State University Press (Kent, OH), 2004.

Contributor to books, including Other Worlds: Fantasy and Science Fiction since 1939, edited by John Teunissen, MOSAIC (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada), 1980; Popular American Fiction, edited by Walton Becham, Research Publishing (Washington, DC), 1987; and Dictionary of Literary Biography, Yearbook 1992, edited by James W. Hipp, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992. Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Extrapolation and Fantasy Review. Associate editor, Tamkang Review, 1981–84.

SIDELIGHTS: William F. Touponce told CA: "I started out my academic career as someone interested in the function of the imagination in reading and the reception of literary works, but now I write primarily as a literary critic interested in the question of authorship. I have been concerned particularly with those authors who choose to write in the genre of the fantastic. What is an author? How does an author transform the genre in which he chooses to write? These questions preoccupy my critical writings. The answers that I have found may be expressed in the relatively short form of an article for the Dictionary of Literary Biography or, when it is a question of an author like Ray Bradbury, who has been publishing and reinventing himself for over half a century, in a 600-page book. Indeed I am always fascinated by the multifarious ways in which an author can renew a 'genre memory,' to use a term coined by the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, whose theories inform and guide my recent work. The intersection between genre memory and authorial intention is where I now locate my work. I work largely from a moment of aesthetic insight that contains in essence all that will unfold later on. This moment of insight is a repetition of the author's own consciousness. I collaborate with others on the historical, textual, and bibliographical details of an author's career."