Peter Lurie

Peter Lurie, assistant professor of English at the University of Richmond, has been awarded a $60,000 Jessie Ball duPont Fellowship to support work on his book, “American Obscurantism” — a study of the importance of difficulty in literature and film.

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for their difficulty and challenges to readers and viewers that he contends “follow from the writer’s sense that historical content manifests itself in a way that is necessarily oblique.”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Other examples of American obscurantism in popular fiction or film “reveal a historical content, such as aspects of American race history or class conflict, that are present — but not directly ‘visible’ — in generic forms like gangster or detective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.