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 currently working on two projects: 

1) An essay on Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land, which will appear in a collection on Southern writing after 2000.  The essay will focus on the significance of place and space, and particularly the significance of Frank Bascombe as narrator and realtor.

2.)  An essay on the significance of the Civil War in contemporary Southern writing.  This essay will be delivered at a conference in February 2009 on the ongoing presence of the Civil War in the American imagination and will later be published in a collection of the conference essays.  I’m beginning to feel that this essay may evolve into a much larger project.  Stay tuned.

Books

The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.

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.