Research Focus:
Creating & Exploring Trends in Art, Music and Literature
James Olney, English professor and coeditor of The Southern Review, looks for answers to modern-day problems in the writings of the past.
From his first book, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography, to his latest work, Memory & Narrative: The Weave of Life Writing, he has been studying this literary genre since 1972. He won the 1999 Christian Gauss Award for literary scholarship and criticism for Memory & Narrative.
Memory & Narrative explores autobiography as a comprehensive literary form, meaning the problems faced by the writers and the solutions to those problems are all contained in the writings themselves.
The tradition of life-writing ranges from the late 4th/early 5th century to today, and, as Olney explains, earlier unsolved problems are explored and sometimes resolved by later writers, though the resolutions are set in new and altered circumstances. The weave formed by this process connects writers across 1,500 years.
Department of English
The work of LSU’s Department of English professors is known internationally – through scholarly books published by the University of Cambridge Press, articles appearing in The Publications of the Modern Language Association, novels listed in the New York Times list of notable books, and poetry read on National Public Radio and around the world.
In addition, their work has been recognized in the form of grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center.
And their ranks are growing. Recent hiring initiatives have brought eight assistant professors, two associate professors, two full-time professors, and one chaired full professor to the English department.
Across the desk are, of course, the students. Recent graduates from the Department of English’s M.F.A. and Ph.D. programs have produced a novel nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, a book on James Joyce’s notoriously difficult novel Finnegan’s Wake, and a collection of essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald published by Oxford University Press.
Enhanced graduate student stipends are also among the most competitive in the nation.
Capitalizing on its distinctive history and location, the English department has lead the interdisciplinary initiative to create the Louisiana and Caribbean Studies Program that focuses on Louisiana’s unique multicultural mix.
Also, the department’s University Writing Program, which works jointly with the Communication Across the Curriculum Program, has revised its courses so that future LSU students will have writing instruction in each year of a four-year university career.
Then there is The Southern Review, which is edited by award-winning novelist Bret Lott, who continues the tradition of its founding editors, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, as one of the nation’s leading literary quarterlies.
