Title: The <i>Confessio</i> of an Academic Ahab: Or, How I Sank My Own Disciplinary Ship
Abstract: I must confess, superficially and straight up, that I could not enter into the writing of this - my second, and please, let it be my last - without first looking into the history of the inaugural lecture as a form. So I did some fairly quick digital browsing, the advantage of which is that the internet's synchronic purview of everything and anything available right this instant implicitly invokes, also, the inbuilt diachrony of time-bound expressions of form and value.