David McNeil - Selected Guest Lectures / Presentations / Interviews
- Interview with Steve Murphy, CTV News at 6, 10 June 2016, on the death of Gordie Howe.
- Jacobite Rebel on the Run, from Scotland to France to Canada: The Memoirs of the Chevalier James Johnstone. Dalhousie English Colloquium, 14 November 2014. MP4
- From the Traditional to the Online Format: Presentation to CLTN 5000 Class. Dalhousie, 27 March 2014. MP4
-
"Hockey and Imagining Canadian Identity": Canadian Studies 2000. Jan. 9, 2013. MP4
-
On The Rape of the Lock: Poetic Diction and the Heroic Couplet: English 2001. Mar. 14, 2016. MP4.
The purpose of this guest lecture was to give students an appreciation of the "heroic couplet" and
"poetic diction" in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry. I was always fond of using props in my lectures,
and so to emphasize the elevated language of poetic diction as well as the sense of balance and symmetry
of the couplet, I would attempt to balance on a wobble board. During this 2016 rendition of the lecture
I fell off the board (around the 17:00 minute mark) and crashed to the floor. I sprang right back up
and said something about the event being symbolic of the "fall" in Western culture, especially the
comic/satiric tradition. However, I don't think my students were buying it, and the truth was that
my forearm was killing me (I thought for a moment that I had broken it!).
Return to David McNeil - Home Page
Last Updated: 21 January 2026.