Trickster in Tweed

How do academics survive the bureaucracy, the petty jealousies, the absurdities of operating in the university? More important, how do they, as humans, cope with the darker shadows that enter professional lives-- illness, sorrow, death? Coyote, The Trickster, a well known figure in the American Indian world, is also the icon for communication scholar Tom Frentz. Frentz uses the survival strategies of The Trickster in his articulate, amusing, and often emotional autoethnography of striving for quality through the worlds of academia and medicine.

Thomas S. Frentz is a professor of Communication at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. An eclectic scholar in both the social sciences and humanities, he has published three books, twenty-nine scholarly articles, four book chapters, over fifty convention papers, and has lectured extensively at colleges and universities across the country. He teaches courses in rhetorical theory, criticism, film, ethnography, and myth. In 1994/1995 he served as president of the Southern States Communication Association. In 2006 he was named Master Researcher by the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. In 2007 the Rhetoric and Communication Theory division of the National Communication Association named him Distinguished Scholar of 2007. He lives in Fayetteville with his cat, Mollie.

Chapter 1 The Call; Chapter 2 Women's Ways; Chapter 3 Life with Father; Chapter 4 Burying Ghosts; Chapter 5 Turning Tricks; Chapter 6 Sheep Speak; Chapter 7 Or Comes the Wolf; Chapter 8 Janice; Chapter 9 Festum Asinorum; Chapter 10 Shepherd Tales; Chapter 11 Trials in the Trenches; Chapter 12 Eye of the Storm; Chapter 13 On Becoming a Better Outlaw; Chapter 14 Last Call; Chapter 15 Performing Quality in Baby Steps;