Robert Brinkmeyer

Professor
Office: 115 Gambrell
(803) 777-4477
brinkmey@sc.edu

Education

Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1980.

Specialization Areas

• Twentieth-Century Southern Literature,
• Contemporary Southern Literature,
• Twentieth-Century Southern Culture,
• Regionalism and Nationalism,
• Westerns and Literature of the West

Recent Courses

See Course Descriptions for detailed information.

• ENGL 759 Twentieth-Century Southern Literature
• SCCC 457 Southern Writers and the West

Current Research Project(s)

I am completing what I hope are final revisions on a book manuscript exploring white Southern writers’ responses to European fascism during the 1930s and 1940s. This study focuses primarily on how white Southern writers reconfigured their understanding of race and culture in light of fascist authoritarianism and Nazi racial policy. I look at both cultural critics, such as the Nashville Agrarians, W. J. Cash, William Alexander Percy, and Lillian Smith, and writers of imaginative literature, including William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, Lillian Hellman, Robert Penn Warren, and Thomas Wolfe. I received a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on this manuscript.

Books

Remapping Southern Literature:  Contemporary Southern Writers and the West. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Delivered as the 42nd Annual Lamar Lectures at Mercer University, October 1998.

Katherine Anne Porter's Artistic Development:  Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993.

The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Three Catholic Writers of the Modern South.  University Press of Mississippi, 1985.

Articles

“Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools: From Novel to Film,” in Twentieth-Century American Fiction on Screen, ed. Barton Palmer.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 65-77.

 “Taking It to the Streets: Flannery O’Connor and the Civil Rights Movement.”  Flannery O’Connor Review.  4 (Spring, 2006), 99-109.

“Marginalization and Mobility: Segregation and the Representation of Southern Poor Whites,” in Reading Southern Poverty Between the Wars, 1918-1939, edited by Martin Crawford and Richard Godden. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006, 223-38.

“The Southern Literary Renaissance,” in A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South, edited by Richard Gray and Owen Robinson.  London: Blackwell, 2004, 148-65.

Awards

John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 2003-04.

Senior Fulbright Appointment, Bicentennial Chair in American Studies, University of Helsinki, 1994-1995.