“Genres of Civil War Memory in Literature after Brown v. Board of Education”

While the sesquicentennial commemoration of the American Civil War has sparked a renewed interest in the literature of the period, the ongoing role of Civil War memory in literature written during the civil rights movement has received less attention. After identifying four genres of Civil War memory that post-1954 American writers simultaneously work within and against, this talk discusses how texts by Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Gwendolyn Brooks counter the chivalric romance of Gone With the Wind in the context of the desegregation of public education. This talk is part of the GLC Brown Bag Lunch Series. Bring your lunch and we’ll provide the drinks & dessert.

Michael LeMahieu is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Pearce Center for Professional Communication at Clemson University. He is the author of Fictions of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature, 1945-1975 (Oxford, 2013) and co-editor of the journal Contemporary Literature. His articles and reviews have appeared in African American Review, American Studies, Modernism/Modernity, and Twentieth-Century Literature. During the Spring 2015 term, he is Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale.