DISTINGUISHED SCHOLAR TO LECTURE ON "THE SOUTHERN MYTH"

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Noel Polk, Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi and one of the nation’s most distinguished scholars of modern Southern literature, will deliver a lecture on Southern identity and myth on Wednesday, Oct. 9, at 7:30 p.m. in Giffels Auditorium.

Entitled, "Outside History, Too; or, How I Learned To Stop Whining and Love The War," Professor Polk's lecture carries forward ideas that he explored in his 1997 book, "Outside the Southern Myth," a memoir - or anti-memoir, as he calls it, since it's most about what he doesn't remember - about growing up in Picayune, Miss.

Picayune, Polk observes, was geographically Southern but not "Southern" in the same ways that Natchez, Vicksburg or Oxford were. Deliberately modern and middle-class in its interests, the town was not backward-looking, as the South is always presumed to be, if only because it didn't have much to look backward at.

When Polk later became a student and scholar of Southern literature, a friction developed between his own South and the "South" that was presented to him in the literature and history of Mississippi and of the region. In brief, he felt outside the Southern myth. Professor Polk's lecture is a further meditation on this deep-seated friction and what he perceives as his own peculiar Southernness and his own family's place in that Southernness.

Professor Polk is the author or editor of over 20 books on Southern literature and is renowned for his work on William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. Polk's lecture is sponsored by the Diane Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society, the Department of English and the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies. All are invited to attend.