UA SCHOLAR WINS GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP FOR RESEARCH ON SOUTHERN LITERATURE

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded University of Arkansas researcher Robert Brinkmeyer one of its prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships. Brinkmeyer joins an elite list of fellowship recipients, which, since 1925, has included some of the foremost artists, scientists and scholars in North America.

"Robert Brinkmeyer has exhibited an exceptional record of service and scholarship at the University of Arkansas," said Donald Bobbitt, interim dean of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. "This recognition from the Guggenheim Foundation simply confirms what we have long known - that Brinkmeyer's intellectual contributions distinguish him as a world-class scholar. Further, he distinguishes this University as a home to some of the best researchers and highest-caliber research in the nation."

This year’s 184 Guggenheim Fellows were selected from over 3,200 applicants in the United States and Canada. They hail from such esteemed institutions as Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Johns Hopkins and Columbia University.

According to the foundation’s press release: "Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishments. The new Fellows include writers, painters, sculptors, photographers, film makers, choreographers, physical and biological scientists, social scientists and scholars in the humanities."

As a scholar of Southern literature, Brinkmeyer will use his fellowship to complete the research and writing of a book, titled, "The Fourth Ghost: European Totalitarianism and the White Southern Imagination, 1930-1950." His duties as chair of the UA English department will be transferred temporarily to the associate chair, Lyna Lee Montgomery, allowing Brinkmeyer to focus fully on the book.

As Brinkmeyer explained in his application to the Guggenheim Foundation, submitted last Fall, his current line of research challenges the notion that Southern writers have always been locked inside of regionalism - isolated from and indifferent to the concerns of the larger world.

Focusing on the World War II era, Brinkmeyer contends that Southern society was keenly aware of the totalitarian regimes pressing in upon Europe. Further, his research shows that cultural critics and writers of the time contemplated the parallel between conditions in Europe and the social and political pressures mounting in the American South.

Though Southerners condemned the Nazi and fascist regimes gaining ground across the Atlantic, they found similarities between their region and the plight of Europe. Authors reflected those similarities in their literature, but they interpreted the similarities differently according to their individual political outlooks, Brinkmeyer said.

For example, conservative Southern writers such as William Alexander Percy, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate characterized totalitarianism as the inevitable end-point of modern economic and social policies that championed equality and reform. Believing such policies aggressively promoted change merely for change’s sake, these writers considered their traditional way of life jeopardized by growing nationalism and modernity in the United States, and they compared the position of the South to that of pre-modern Europe.

Liberal Southern writers also drew comparisons between totalitarianism and the South. But for these authors - including Clarence Cason, W.J. Cash, Lillian Smith and Stetson Kennedy - the Southern way of life wasn’t threatened by fascism; it was an example of it.

"In their eyes the traditional South looked less traditional than totalitarian, under the thumb of dictatorial ideas - particularly the ideologies of racial segregation and economic exploitation - if not dictators per se," Brinkmeyer said.

He points out that Cash’s 1941 book "The Mind of the South" draws parallels between Southern attitude and culture and those that gave rise to Nazi Germany. Other authors, including Smith and Kennedy, wrote of Southern tradition, citing its oppressive social and economic conditions as characteristic of totalitarian regimes.

Brinkmeyer finds that these ideas appeared in fiction as well, where Southern writers lifted images, metaphors and themes from the totalitarian invasion of Europe to illustrate the tension between modernism and tradition in the South.

Carson McCullers’ novels "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" and "A Member of the Wedding," written in 1940 and 1946 respectively, feature repeated references to the war in news reports, radio programs and conversations. The small-town lives of her characters, plagued by racial tension and social disorder, heighten both the terror and appeal of that onslaught of totalitarian ideology.

By examining Southern writing in an international context, Brinkmeyer hopes to present a new perspective on how Southerners regarded their own region. At the same time, his findings may finally free regionalism from a reputation of isolation, indifference and chronic self-reference - offering evidence that Southern literature responded critically and thematically to events in the world around it.

The Guggenheim Fellowship allows Brinkmeyer a full year to pursue this line of scholarship. It also places him in the top tier of American academics and artists. Past Fellows include Ansel Adams, Henry Kissinger, Isamu Noguchi, Linus Pauling, Aaron Copland, Derek Walcott, James Watson, Langston Hughes, Martha Graham, Vladimir Nabakov and Eudora Welty.

For more information about the Guggeheim Foundation and its Fellowship program, visit http://www.gf.org/.