David McNeil, Associate Professor, Retired

"MacNeil" Surname and R-L165 (S68) Y-DNA: R1b1a2a1a1b5b. mtDNA: H Projects: kit no. 206620
"Ultimately the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than the life of an oyster." Hume, from "Of Suicide"

Status: "Listed as day-to-day" (aren't we all?)

SCANS Class (ZOOM), Apr. 11 - May 23, 2024: The Cultural Hi$tory of Money

Teaching and Research Interests

• - Spectatorship in Early Modern England (with Ron Huebert)
• - Self-Likenesses in the Mural
, British Murals Network
Excerpt on irony in the Visual Arts
• - Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature
• - Jacobitism (specifically the Memoirs of the Chevalier James Johnstone(with Drïss Aissaoui)
• - Satire, the novel, Sports Literature (Hockey)
• - Fictionalization of America (the eighteenth-century English novel)
• - War and the Arts
• - The Cultural History of Money
• - theory of the Spectacle (Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (1967); see also the film, and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988)

Books:

• co-editor and contributor,

  Early Modern Spectatorship (UMQP)

  

• biography of Gerry McNeil,

  In the Pressure of the Moment: Remembering Gerry McNeil (Midtown)

  

  The Original Six Tour (2016), Western Tour (2016), Review & Press

• author,

  The Grotesque Description of War and the Military in Eighteen-Century English Fiction (U of Delaware P).

  

Reviewed in War, Literature and the Arts

Full Curriculum vitae download:

• WORD format

• PDF format

- Selected Publications
- Recent Conference Papers
- Other Lectures/Presentations/Interviews

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Classes Taught: 1984-2018 Dalhousie University

• Introduction to Literature (sample class: Sept. 16, 2015)
• Framed Narratives
• Gothic Fiction
• Satire
• English Poetry and Prose: 1660-1740
• English Fiction to 1820
• Swift and His Age
• Literature and Revolution (1660-1800) (sample class: Sept. 16, 2015)
• Spectatorship in the Early Modern England (online option available)
• Restoration Theatre
• Desire and the Eighteenth-Century Novel
• Popular Culture and the Eighteenth Century
• Advanced American: Contemporary Non-Fictional Prose

Classes Taught: 2018-2024 SCANS

• Hockey and Canadian Culture
• Satire
• The Cultural Hi$tory of Money

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Other Enthusiasms:

• Morricone, of course. Patricia Janeckova (RIP)

• Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (excellent analysis of the emphasis on spectacle and entertainment in contemporary society),

  the Forward

  .

• 

  Tom Bissel on the 2oth anniversary edition of David Foster Wallace's contemporary, maximalist Meanippean Satire

  .

• ,

  especially The Gold Rush

  

  (wonderfully funny and moving),

• Melody Gardot.

  

• Miles Davis.

• Dirt Road to Victory, The Adam Hewey Band

  

• For the most persuasive explanation of the world and so much more, read

  Schopenhauer,

  

  his looks changed, but not his worldview,

  ... the will, existence itself, is a constant suffering, and is partly woeful, partly fearful. The same thing, on the other hand, as representation alone, purely contemplated, or repeated through art, free from pain, presents us with a significant spectacle. The World as Will and Representation I.52

  Arthur Schopenhauer

• The Roar returns--Hawks win the 2010 Cup!

  
  

  an endless orgasm of the heart.

  

  
  

  Hawks win again in 2013--another endless orgasm of the heart.

  
  

  Okay--a third, overlaid, endless orgasm of the heart.

  Last Updated: May 30, 2025