Some thoughts and reflections on identity, teaching, and writing, and how they might affect one another

This chapter moves through a series of loosely linked reflections on (in no particular order, because the following are not separate from one another) politics, teaching, and writing, and it attempts to think through the ways in which each shapes the other and produces something we might be tempted to call and identity. The main ideas are: that the writer’s sense of self is, at least in part, forged in his writing; and that his teaching shapes his writing just as his writing shapes his teaching.