Montaigne Medal Finalist (Eric Hoffer Awards)

In Garage Criticism Peter Babiak eviscerates and deflates some of the cultural sacred cows of our time. From Fifty Shades of Grey (“Hot for Teacher: What Fifty Shades of Grey Taught Me About Salacious Grammar, Sexy Women and the Scandalous Conflation of Cultural and Literary Culture”) to the disintegration of the “deep read” (“F You Professor: Tumblr, Triggers and the Allergies of Reading”) to the Hunger Games (“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised—But It Might Be Carnivalized ‘N’ Shit”) and Twilight (“Really Dumb Students”), through to student/professor relationships, inappropriate office visits, and a shared “voluptuous appetite for Nabokov.” Babiak deconstructs our fascination with internet culture, takes on the inanities of youthful, ungrammatical irises, devolves the rhetorical hallucinations of economics and marketing, and reasserts the supremacy of linguistic thinking in everyday cultural affairs.

Babiak’s is a new and timely voice in the arena of cultural criticism and critical theory.

Praise for Garage Criticism:

"... Somewhere, a transition takes place and the garage critic is replaced by the father, lover, the middle-aged man searching for some meaning in a silly world. The wisdom of this book doesn’t come from its dismantling of vacuous modern culture, but from its subtle examination of fatherhood, the follies of man, the inevitable fray of husbandry, and the tribulation of losing the ones you love. These are messages that are left nearly unsaid, unseen, but like stars resting beneath a sunrise, achingly they remain long after the book is closed.” (Cascade, UFV)

"It’s that dry tone that makes many of his think pieces as amusing as they are refreshing — they contain distinctly unfashionable views about all sorts of fashionable nonsense. …” (The Tyee)

Born in an ethnic enclave of Oakville, Peter Babiak grew up in Hamilton, Kitchener, and Toronto, Ontario. He studied English language and literature at the University of Waterloo, McMaster, and York, and has taught literature, history and social sciences at a jail for young offenders, contract law and critical thinking at George Brown College, and economics at Dominion College, all in Toronto. Peter moved to Vancouver in 1994 to take an adjunct position teaching English at the University of British Columbia, where he worked for ten years. From 2000 to 2002 he coordinated a barrier-free lecture series and educational facility/book room on Powell Street in Vancouver’s Eastside, and then from 2002 to 2006 he was Academic Director of Humanities 101, a pioneering outreach program, the first of its kind in Canada, that brought classes in the liberal arts, social sciences and “grammar boot camp” to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He has been teaching English literature, linguistics and grammar/rhetoric at Langara College for well over a decade.

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