David Thorburn (scholar)

[6] A student, Thomas E. Ricks, described Professor Thorburn as a challenging and thought-provoking teacher, remembering that one of his challenges——to tell why Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury was not a great novel——was one of the "best assessments" he ever got during his studies there.

[7] In an essay in The American Prospect, he wondered whether the human disposition to view new technologies through the use of metaphor might be limiting our understanding of the intrinsic qualities and possibilities of the Internet.

[15] The computer encourages joining, interaction, sharing, the creation of communities of interest; yet it is also congenial to our uncivic preferences for isolation, the avoidance of human contact, solipsism, "lurking," voyeurism.

Through its power to confer anonymity, it feeds instincts for scandal, revenge, name-calling, surveillance, pornography.Thorburn was awarded Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, and Rockefeller foundation fellowships.

It is even more disturbing to reflect on how minutely the canon of Western literature has been routinized and commodified, murdered and dissected by assembly-line practices, and then to think on how enfeebled must be the reading and writing skills of the poor souls who buy such papers.

Thorburn, in his Teaching Company course entitled Masterworks of Early 20th-Century Literature , made connections between impressionist painters and modernist literature . He suggested that modernist writers, like Claude Monet 's impressionist paintings of water lilies , showed an awareness of art as art, rejected realistic interpretations of the world, registered the limitations of art, and dramatized "a drive towards the abstract". [ 9 ]