Lindolenex | Members | Michael Dennis Hood

Michael Dennis Hood, phd

After teaching English in high school for five years, MICHAEL D. HOOD received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Oregon. Professor Hood has taught composition, medieval literature, literary criticism and great books at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina for the last thirty-one years. In 1985 he was the first recipient of the Adrian Award for Teaching excellence at Belmont Abbey College.

As Director of Freshman Composition, he trained faculty to use the enthymeme as the primary organizing rhetorical principle for an idea-centered, argument-based writing course. In addition, as Director of the Great Books Program, he conducted summer seminars for faculty for the purpose of discussing the texts read in the great books course and of examining discernible dialectical patterns in the development of ideas in the West. The great books course functioned as a capstone experience for Abbey students.

Professor Hood’s publications have been in the area of rhetoric and composition studies. His teaching and research interests include the classical enthymeme and composition pedagogy, and modern rhetorical theory.

WORKS

— Michael D. Hood, Aristotle's Enthymeme: Its Theory and Application to Discourse, Department of English, University of Oregon, PhD Dissertation, 1984. “This study demonstrates how Aristotle’s enthymeme, in the context of his epistemology, functions as the generative principle of discourse, and thus as a practical tool for teaching composition”.

— Michael D. Hood, "The Enthymeme: A Brief Bibliography of Modern Sources," Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 3/4 (Summer - Autumn, 1984), pp. 159-162.

— Michael D. Hood, Teaching Freshman Composition [microform: The Language of Oppression vs. the Language of Liberation / Michael D. Hood. Distributed by ERIC Clearinghouse, [Washington, D.C.]: 1986.

— Michael D. Hood, Designing an Idea-Centered Freshman Composition Program to Empower Student Writers [microform] / Distributed by ERIC Clearinghouse, [Washington, D.C.]: 1989.

— Michael D. Hood, "Basic Writing Courses and Programs". In M. G. Moran et alii, Research in Basic Writing: A Bibliographic Sourcebook, New York: Greenwood Press, 1990, pp. 143-163. In this essay dealing with Pedagogical Perspectives, Michael D. Hood explores the issues associated with designing, developing, administering, and evaluating basic writing courses and programs.

Working with Lindolenex research group, Professor Hood has been the author of several important chapters (translated into Spanish) in their first publication, Del Razonamiento a la argumentación (2012). After this initial collaboration, in The Essential Enthymeme (2015) Hood’s works have presented a definite as well as innovative interpretation of the enthymeme’s potentialities, not only from a theoretical point of view but also in a practical pedagogical and communicative dimension: “The Enthymeme as a Practical Rhetoric Concept for Teaching Composition”, “The Role of the Enthymeme in the Connection between Reading and Writing”, “The Place of the Enthymeme in Composition Studies”, and “Essential Modern Readings on the Enthymeme”. He is also the linguistic editor of this publication.

Finally, Michael D. Hood has presented two recent conference papers (2014 and 2015) concerning the crucial role of the enthymeme in teaching composition. Each presentation is in two parts, first the theory and then the application.

Professor Hood also has written and published short fiction:

The William and Mary Review, v. 40.2, 2002: “The End of the West and Practically Everything Else”.
Knight Literary Journal, Spring, 2004: “All the Colors of the Rainbow”.
Agora, v. 40, 2007: “Squawk Box”.
Agora, v. 41, 2008: “What’s in a Name?”
Agora, v. 42, 2009: “The Lady with the Pet Rock”.
Agora, v. 43, 2010: “Lion King”.
Indiana English, v. 33.1, 2011: “English Class”.
Agora, v. 44, 2011: “House of Cards”.
Agora, v. 45, 2012: “A Villanelle: From Lines Written by Donald Hall”, “The Drug Store”.
Third Wednesday, v. 5.3, 2013: “Bumping off Barbie”.
Blank Fiction (blog posting), 2014: “The Birdhouse”.
The Ravens Perch (online publication) 2016: “Field Trip”.

BooKS

Bad Boys: Stories and Tales, XLibris, LLC, 2014.

“Bad boys deviate from accepted norms of behavior; they act in the extreme. These stories in the Bad Boys collection feature an array of bad boys who do just this. For example, there's Chad Slack who cheats his way through school; the Dean who is overtaken by excessive tenderness because he suffers from pancreatic detachment; Fuzzy Nelson, a marketing major, who obsesses about the perfect focus group; Uncle Hosea, a religious fanatic, who is looking for the Garden of End at the North Pole; Cooper Hawk, a sensitive predator, who desperately wants to be a bad boy; Pinky Condon, an auditor and avid member of the Custer Society, who terrorizes branch managers; the Warden who directs "the band" which is really a paramilitary organization; Professor Dumpté whose project is deconstructing the entire Western literary canon; and Beamer Bird, an enfant terrible, who longs to reclaim his reputation in the world of belles lettres.” (Back cover).