Guest Lecture Martyn Bone (University of Copenhagen)

This talk will explore novelist Russell Banks’ engagement with the U.S. South vis-à-vis both the nation and the Caribbean. It will focus mostly on Banks’ breakthrough novel Continental Drift (1985), especially its representation of Florida’s liminal location on a “north-south axis” extending from New Hampshire to Haiti. The talk will also show how Banks can be read in relation to another writer who located Florida hemispherically: Zora Neale Hurston. I will also briefly compare the dual role of spirit possession in Banks’ fiction—as a strategy of resistance to oppression, and a metaphor for the exploitation of bodies and labor--to the work of Erna Brodber, another author whose work extends Hurston’s hemispheric literary geography.

Martyn Bone is associate professor of American Literature and coordinator of the Center for Transnational American Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (Louisiana State UP, 2005) and Where the New World Is: Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales (U of Georgia P, 2018); the editor of Perspectives on Barry Hannah (UP of Mississippi, 2007); and the co-editor of a three-volume mini-series, including Creating and Consuming the U.S. South (UP of Florida, 2015). His articles have appeared in American Literature, CR: New Centennial Review, Journal of American Studies, and other journals.

The event is free and open to the public.

This lecture is organized by the Department of American Studies.

Department of American Studies Graz
Institut für Amerikanistik
Attemsgasse 25/II
A-8010 Graz
Tel. +43/316/380-2465
amerikanistik(at)uni-graz.at

http://amerikanistik.uni-graz.at/