Hellwig has published on a wide range of topics, including composition studies, graduate programs in English, Seventeenth Century English literature, computational linguistics, and business communications. His research interests include American literature and computer applications in literature and in composition, and he is currently negotiating a book contract on Mark Twain. He is also working on Faulkner, myth, and popular culture of the 1950’s; on Have Gun Will Travel, Star Trek, and Star Wars: “travel” in modern culture. He is a book reviewer for a number of publishers, mostly for composition textbooks but a few in literary criticism.; He has offered to be a beta tester for online editions. He presents papers on a variety of topics regularly at regional and national conferences, such as MLA, ALA, SAMLA, NCTE, and other conferences.

I was for a long time particularly keen on the honor of being thought of as a key researcher in computational linguistics. I even had agents of the Central Intelligence Agency appear at conferences where I would discuss my work at semantic and syntactic computer analysis. Yes, it was a bit disconcerting to see the usual name badge on several individuals clearly identifying that they were not from academic institutions but from the CIA. I finally had the pleasure of talking with one of these researchers, and she explained the interest of the agency in my work, even letting me know that she had worked on a similar computer program analyzing the truthfulness of politicians (her work was apparently based in the Netherlands). I recognized at some point that I should not pursue this line of work, although I still remain vaguely pleased with some of the lines of inquiry. I occasionally hear from a stray researcher trying to get me to admit to something I haven’t done.

Thanks to a university grant, I started a long time ago a project on Mark Twain. That was a very helpful grant, and led to some work at the Mark Twain Project in Berkeley.

Currently, I am wrapping up a book manuscript on Mark Twain’s travel works. I am negotiating a book contract with a publisher, a contract I haven’t signed. I have been doing that manuscript far too long. I have several projects on Faulkner, myth, and popular culture I need to turn to. I think I have offered to edit Twain’s Following the Equator.

Twain will be always there for additional projects, but it would be useful to turn to TV episodes from 1957-63 of Have Gun Will Travel, which is an extension, oddly enough, of the work I’ve done on Twain’s travel works. This particular show has a black-suited anti-hero, a mercenary who kills for a flat fee of $1,000, with the name of Paladin (opening song aptly naming him as a “knight without armor in a savage land”), who quotes Shakespeare, Keats, and Pliny (among many others) while mowing down his victims—although sometimes he lets them go and shoots the people who hired him—and apparently is a classical pianist as well. Gene Roddenberry wrote a number of these episodes, and it is apparent that Paladin mutated into characters on Star Trek; George Lucas may have borrowed this guy for Darth Vader.

Courses Taught

I liked teaching all of these courses:

Professional and Business Writing, American Literature, Introduction to Literature, World Literature, Early Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature, Late Nineteenth Century British and American Literature, Literary Analysis, Senior Seminar in Undergraduate Literature, Mark Twain, Methods of Literary Scholarship graduate seminar, Teaching Literature graduate seminar, online courses in Critical Reading and Writing and in Business Writing.

I don’t have any favorites, I guess. I liked using vacuum tube radios in my professional writing classes as examples of how to fix things (research, instruction manuals, and so forth); I liked talking about alcoholism in The Sun Also Rises in the literary analysis class, because I could rant about Hemingway’s personal life; I liked discussing the job market communication process in business writing classes. Some graduate students might claim that I loved to torture them in the bibliography and research course; I just found it an engaging course. I enjoy hearing from students who later publish or present papers or who win grants. I liked the graduate pedagogy course on literature (particularly the evening I demonstrated the relative value of literature by showing a comic book worth $10,000 compared to a first edition of Twain’s Following the Equator worth about $100). I liked the one Mark Twain course when I discovered during class one evening some very interesting things about The Prince and The Pauper. I could go on, but I won’t. I just haven’t found a way to use legitimately the tasks I perform on my vineyard as ways of teaching a writing course, though pruning the vines could be linked to editing tasks.

 

Office: LA 242
Office Phone: 282-2893
hellharo@isu.edu