English professor wins Jessie Ball DuPont Fellowship to do research for upcoming book

University of Richmond professor wins $60,000 fellowship to research obscurity in depicting history in literature and film

October 23, 2009

He will conduct research at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C., throughout the 2009-10 academic year.

Lurie will examine books by William Faulkner, Hart Crane and Dashiell Hammett and the films "The Shining" and "Fargo" — all writers and works notorious for their difficulty and challenges to readers and viewers that he contends "follow from the writer's sense that historical content manifests itself in a way that is necessarily oblique." He will show how they differ from earlier works, such as D.W. Griffith's silent-era film "The Birth of a Nation," that claim to show history as it occurred.

"It is this conceit — of history-as-visible or of a certain narrative account of the past as ‘true' — that I see later writers and filmmakers challenge," said Lurie.

Other examples of American obscurantism in popular fiction or film "reveal a historical content, such as aspects of American race history or class conflict, that are present — but not directly ‘visible' — in generic forms like gangster or detective stories, American Gothic and the horror movie," said Lurie.

Posted June 8, 2009

Article ID: 424