Profile
MA,
PhD Cantab
Honorary Assistant Professor
Simon
Alderson was a full-time staff member of the School of English
at HKU from 1997 to 2006. Since then, as an Honorary Asst Professor,
he has continued to offer courses to students at both undergraduate
and postgraduate level.
Alderson
himself studied at the University of Cambridge in the UK, where
he obtained his BA in 1989 and his PhD in 1993. He taught for
one year at St Anne's College Oxford before returning to Trinity
College Cambridge on a four-year Research Fellowship. In 1997
he moved to the University of Hong Kong.
His
academic interests lie in language history and linguistic change,
the linguistic basis of 'style', language play, and the nature
and possibilities of literary language. He has published articles
on iconicity in language and literature and on punning and wordplay,
and taught several related courses.
He
also has interests in the relations between texts and images
across time and cultures. He has written on ut pictura poesis
and ideas of 'natural' representation, and taught the course
'Text & Image' in which the relations of painting and illustration
to written texts is explored.
Outside
the university environment, Alderson puts his expertise to practical
use. He runs his own writing and editing business, which also
offers seminars and consultancy on English language usage to
businesses and government departments in Hong Kong. He is also
working with a local Hong Kong educational publisher in preparing
English language textbooks and supporting materials for secondary
school students.
Publications
Selected
publications:
'Ut
pictura poesis and its discontents in late seventeenth- and
early eighteenth-century England and France', Word & Image
11, 1995.
'Alexander Pope and the nature of language', Review of English
Studies 47, 1996.
'Swift's wordplay', Swift Studies 11, 1996.
'The Augustan attack on the pun', Eighteenth-Century Life 20,
1996.
'Iconicity in literature: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
prose writing'. In Olga Fischer and Max Nanny, eds., Form Miming
Meaning: Iconicity in Language and Literature. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 1999.
'Chance and imagination in literary iconicity', European Journal
of Language and Literature 5, 2001.
Selected
courses taught for the School of English:
Text & Image
Literary Linguistics
Form and Meaning
History of English
Narrative Prose
The Language of Media (MA course) |
