FEBRUARY 15- Michael Kreyling

WHO NEEDS CEREMONIES OF MEMORY?: THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY

February 15, 2011 at  4 p.m. in the Royall Room in the UNC Alumni Center

Michael Kreyling is currently working on a book that explores the cultural politics of memory in representations of the South through an examination of re-enacted memory in latter-day versions of the Civil War, the construction of white liberal southern-ness in post-Civil Rights fiction and works by authors such as Robert Penn Warren and W.E.B. Dubois. He is also working on a study of the work of the detective novelist Kenneth Millar (1915-83), who wrote under the pseudonym, Ross Macdonald. The book includes analyses of Millar’s use of autobiography founded upon the Freudian model of self-analysis and his understanding of the cultural and literary history of the detective novel.

Michael Kreyling received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1975. Before coming to Vanderbilt in 1985, he taught at Mississippi State University and Tulane University. At Vanderbilt, he teaches classes in twentieth century American literature; Southern literature; American and Southern studies; and the works of authors such as Faulkner, Welty, and Wright.

He is the author of six books, which include Figures of the Hero in Southern Narrative (1986), Understanding Eudora Welty (1999), and Inventing Southern Literature (1998), which won the Eudora Welty Prize. He has also published numerous articles, primarily on Southern literature from the antebellum period up through the twentieth century, in journals such as the Southern Review, Southern Quarterly, and American Literary History.