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 biography:  William Anthony Nericcio   alternative webINDEX | tex[t]-mexgalleryblog 
eliable dispatches from elite West Coast spies  reveal that William Anthony Nericcio (aka "Memo," aka "Bill") presently toils as Professor and Chair of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. Other clandestine West Coast agents confirm that he labors there in various academic disguises including: American Literature scholar, Latin American Studies prof, Chicana/Chicano Studies devotee, ALA/Choice Award Winning Film Studies Guru, Cultural Studies maven, and, last but not least, feverish rasquache Tejano acolyte of Deconstruction; however, it should be added that other embedded shady narcs contend these diverse academic pursuits are a front for Nericcio's true obsessions: graphic design, web-surfing,  Man Ray's photographyEuro/Indy movies, Bill Elder, Remedios Varo, Jacques Derrida, Severo Sarduy, Rosario Castellanos, and Meret Oppenheim

Before joining SDSU's crack team of talented, exegetic misfits, Nericcio held earlier postings at The University of Connecticut, his first, most infamous English Department posting, and at Cornell University, where, working with taskmaster mentors (Carlos Fuentes, Dominic LaCapra, Edgar Rosenberg, Wolfgang Holdheim, Nelly Furman, Enrico Mario Santí, Gayatri Spivak and Henry Louis Gates Jr.), he completed his doctoral degree in Comparative Literature with a dissertation entitled The Politics of Solitude: Alienation in the Literatures of the Americas.

Our well-paid East Coast gumshoes and informants tell odd, whispered tales regarding Nericcio's time in Ithaca: his enigmatic midnight chats with Vladimir Nabokov's surly ghost far above Cayuga's waters; his now epic 2am street-fight with four drunk Cornell gringo frat-rats in a snowstorm near the corner of Court and Tioga; his critical theory lucha libre disputes with Derrida-glosser Jonathan Culler and his curious better-half, Cynthia Chase (a relative of once-funny, SNL-alum Chevy Chase), who deemed Nericcio's hieroglyphic notetaking a mark of incipient moronity; his legendary tequila-induced, body-sculpture-snow-angel-making with LA playwright Oliver Mayer at the top of the Buffalo St. hill; and lastly, his boisterous conjunto dancing alongside Carlos Fuentes in an Ithaca Union hall. Sadly, our usually reliable 'townie' snitches loitering outside the Haunt have failed to document these claims.

Our diligent Northern Mexican agents recently discovered that Nericcio, a recovering Catholic school boy from South Texas (seized 1st-grade snapshot to your left), received his Bachelor's of Arts degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin (1984), this while working part-time at the Texas Tavern (now demolished) and The Cactus Cafe as a barrista/bartender and prowling posh 6th Street cocktail lounges. This was also the time when Nericcio, along with Jay Whitley aspired to 80s, new-wave, music stardom in the indy, third-coast, rock combo, The Dyed Blondes--de rigueur recording studio snapshot to your right.

Now headquartered near the California/Mexico border with SDSU, he serves on the faculty of the Center for Latin American Studies, The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences (MALAS) and the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies in addition to his English and CompLit chairing/professor duties. A native son of Laredo, Texas, with assorted ancestors hailing from General Téran & Monterrey, Mexico, Partanna, Sicily, and (it is silently whispered) the merry ol' island of England, Nericcio tells anyone willing to listen that he is a post-Movimiento Chicano. In this vein, the testimony of well-placed former students is useful, with numerous depositions existing that attest to Nericcio being a 'a Sicilian Tejano' or to him publicly declaiming nostalgic, nationalistic odes to Flaco Jimenez, La Llorona, 'Tejas' and the Rio Grande river.  Other witnesses speak of overhearing eloquent soliloquies in San Diego dive bars wherein Nericcio, between sips, confesses his obsessions with Sleestaks, The Get-Away Chase Game, Al Jaffee, Monty Python, Kurt Wiese, Captain Kangaroo, Mannix, The Banana Splits, Medical Center, Wacky Packages, La India María, Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster, Land of the Lost, Dean Martin, Los Polivoces, Mil Mascaras, the late Edward Said, Gamera, and HR Pufnstuf.

Nericcio has published articles on Orson Welles's proto-Chicano masterpiece Touch of Evil1, Octavio Paz's shrouded schizophrenic political oscillations (Siglo XX/20th Century: Critique & Cultural Discourse, 10:1-2 1992-93), and Jorge Luis Borges's, Eugène Delacroix's, and Jacques Derrida's unlikely textual mènage-á-trois in Susan Daitch's LC.  In 1996, Nericcio's "Artif[r]acture: Virulent Pictures, Graphic Narrative, and the Ideology of the Visual"--the sprawling, illustrated essay was one of the first scholarly pieces to appear on comics in academe. In 1998, his illustrated exposé on Speedy Gonzales, "Autopsy of a Rat: Odd, Sundry Parables of Freddy Lopez, Speedy Gonzales, and Other Chicano/Latino Marionettes Prancing about Our First World Visual Emporium," was brought kicking and screaming into the world by Camera Obscura, A Journal of Feminism Culture and Media Studies--now distributed by Duke University Press.  2002 saw  the appearance of three publications: 1) a revised and expanded essay on Rita Hayworth, electrolysis, and the existential in Violence and the Body2) a gratuitously illustrated meditation on Gilbert Hernandez's illustrated biography of Frida Kahlo (detail opposite) in NYU Press's Latina/o Popular Culture; and 3) a short rant on anti-undocumented worker violence, the Marquis de Sade, and California law enforcement for BAD SUBJECTS, UC Berkeley's HOT Lefty rag. A more recent opus (2004), ten years in the making, for The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies examines the Paul Reubens' masturbation scandal back in the 1990s and is entitled "Watching Critics, Watching Journalists, Watching Sheriffs, Watching Pee-wee Herman Watch: The Extraordinary Case of the Saturday Morning Children's Show Celebrity Who Masturbated"--reliable snitches claim the highlight of the opus is some odd revelation about transvestites, Medical Center, and Robert Reed, the pater familias on the Brady Bunch. Other not-so-recent and recent scholarly gigs include Nericcio's London lecture, "In the Storm of the Eye: Pages Torn From a Voyeur Semiotician's Diary During the Plague of Bad Theory"(1998), for Goldsmith College and the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) and "Cinematography, Photography and Literature: Robert Frank's Aesthetic Triptych" (2000) for the Museum of Photographic Arts (MoPA), San Diego. Nericcio's also has lectured abroad at the Freud Museum in London where he spoke on the 'fertile' connection between Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic work and the Viennese wizard's collection of erotic antiquities--this took place during a Fall 2001 Semester in London where Nericcio worked as a Visiting Senior Lecturer in Literature for the Foundation for Interational Education and SDSU (note the surveillance photo to your right, that's him with the strange expression standing by Freud's infamous couch). Apparently the Freud Museum guards failed to inform London authorities of various improprieties with Herr Sigmund's couch as in San Diego, Spring 2002, this candid shot was taken of Nericcio ranting about Nietzsche at a pacific REVIEW public reading. 2003 opened with Nericcio joining the editorial advisory board of GOBSHITE QUARTERLY an independent international literary magazine. 

Travel also seemed to be on the agenda with lectures at NEMLA, The University of Connecticut's Department of English, and Brown University's Department of Africana Studiestopped off with a visit to the Netherlands where Nericcio chaired a panel and delivered a lecture at the first Congress of the International Association of American Studies in LeidenSummer 2003 found him once again leading a group of adventurous SDSU students to London for the 1st annual LONDON CALLING, SDSU Summer Program.  He has subsequently led UK-junkets in 2005 and 2007.

November 2003 saw Nericcio working as the warm-up act (spycam shot opposite) for the Ballet Nacional de Cuba for the La Jolla Music Society. December 2003, Nericcio delivered a harangue for Affirmative Action at the San Diego MLA for its ADE/ADFL enclaves. In February 2004, Nericcio enjoyed his Spring sabbatical--but took a break from occasional naps by jetting up to the East Coast in February for a cool Gangster Symposia at the SUNY Stony Brook Humanities Research Institute--click young John Gotti's mug to your right for more info.  
In Summer 2004, Nericcio, taking a break from the vagaries of the University Lecture Hall, traded chalk for pine tar as he played utility outfielder for the league-leading National City Dukes in the San Diego Adult Baseball League.  Fall 2004 he started up with his Sinematic Bodies: Intro to Lit and Film circus (which featured, among other things, a mad dash across campus by mimes (chapeau Antonioni) and started overseeing the production of cultural studies tomes with Harry Polkinhorn for Hyperbole Books--touted by the one and only, notorious and untoward Playboy Magazine (scroll down to the SDSU-link on the left hand side). Spring 2005 saw the startup of his Freud's Bastard Children class and the Literature After Derrida lecture series. Fall 2005 saw Nericcio lead a graduate seminar on his fallen guru Jacques Derrida and teach a comedy seminar in honor of his mentor, Richard Simon.  2006 was filled with flights of sinemadness with Michael Powell and Walker Percy; frolics in the imperial bedroom, with James Joyce, Homer and Carlos Fuentes;  prowls down the alleyways of film noir and pulp fiction with Orson Welles and Quentin Tarantino; and ended explosively with 500 students in Wiik Auditorium. 2007 began with a bang as Nericcio finally finished his 16-years-in-the-making magnum opus for the University of Texas Press, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America--it appeared January 15, 2007. Since 2007 and into 2008, the Laredo ex-patriot has been spotted at Oberlin College, Purdue University, USC, Los Angeles's Skylight Books, The Universty of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas, San Antonio, and the University of San Diego hawking his wares and generally trying to invoke academic mischief. In February 2009, Nericcio is rumored to be invading Ohio State University for a lecture and signing. Summer 2009 finds the Laredo exile back in London teaching and, in the fall, finishing his follow-up book to Tex[t]-Mex, Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race.

Indulgent visitors to this page waiting for hell to freeze-over can peek at online syllabi from Nericcio's courses (click on the images below) or sample this alternative index of WWWeb-based shenanigans where many of his essays are available in Adobe's ubiquitous pdf format. Also available are two illustrated fragments from his theoretical memoir on the US/Mexico border: "REMEMBER" & "CHISME";book reviews of Charles Bukowski's finale Pulp, Rudolfo Anaya's new age weeper Jalamanta, and Richard Rodriguez's bizarre smash bestseller Days of Obligation (these pieces originally appeared in World Literature Today);an illustrated transcript of Nericcio's MOPA introduction to Robert Frank's, Alfred Leslie's, Jack Kerouac's and Allen Ginsberg's Pull My Daisy (popthe Kerouac balloon floating to your right); and lastly, a scathing send-up of Ray Bradbury's, Edward James Olmos's and Disney's cine-chimera, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit--lick the tasty yellow helado/popsicle opposite.

Lastly (for the poor, misbegotten soul who has scrollled this far down the page!), do please click on the picture here to your right to view the birth of Nericcio's efforts as a Ford Focus Spanish-language voiceover star and would-be commercial actor.  Or, alternatively, click this link to see a newspaper story for which Nericcio SWEARS he did not pay or another yellow press wonder that documents the trials and tribulations of teaching 500 student classes at SDSU.


 
Footnotes

1. There is some archival evidence of a personal connection to Welles; The Library of Congress has graciously allowed us to repost a facsimile of this Los Angeles Herald-Tribune fragment; the photographer is unknown.  L of C forensic photographic specialists date the piece to around 1967.



Prime Contact
William Anthony Nericcio
memo@sdsu.edu or bnericci@mail.sdsu.edu

Editorial Portfolio 


Hyperbole Books
San Diego State University Press

Academic Postings
English & Comparative Literature
CLAS | MALAS | CCS

Memogr@phics Design
an illustrated digital gallery of book designs for SDSU Press & Hyperbole Books




Spring 2007

English 493
Literature and Film
The Obscene Machine


obscene machine blog supplement


Spring 2007
| English 725
Seminar in Ethnic American Film and Literature: Ethnic Mannequins or the Obcene Machine


ethnic mannequin blog supplement





english 301 | summer 2004

english 220 | fall 2004




   

comparative literature 595: 
LITERATURE AND AESTHETICS / GLAMOUR
FALL 2003

english 220: 
The NAKED EYE/I
FALL 2003

comparative literature 594:ART AND LITERATURE
libidinal progeny: jacques derrida and the dance of word and image

comparative literature 445, fall 2002
portraits, masks and signatures

english 301, fall 2002
sinema

english 602 
theory and literary criticism: primary secondary tertiary

english 301, summer 2002
marx, freud the psychological novel

english 220 
an introduction to literature: the framed eye/i

wwweb portfolio

Nericcio's office door | dungeons of Adams Humanities (now defunct); my digs are in Arts and Letters!


kahloneri


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