Center for the Study of the American South

Noel Polk

Inside Agitators: Civil Writes in Mississippi

September 7, 2010 at 4pm in the Royall Room at the UNC Alumni Center

 

On September 7, Noel Polk will present Inside Agitators: Civil Writes in Mississippi for the first Hutchins Lecture of the year. He will look at a novel by Mississippian Jack Butler, Jujitsu for Christ. which took as a subject not so much the Civil Rights movement itself as its effect, as it spirals out away from the movement into the civilian ranks where white and black attempt to come to terms with its meaning for them and their relationships.

Noel Polk, professor of English, emeritus, is a specialist in the American novel. He has published and lectured widely in the United States, Europe, Japan, and the former Soviet Union on William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. Publications include Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work (1993), Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner (1996), and Outside the Southern Myth (1997). He has edited the novels of William Faulkner for the Library of America and Random House and recently (2001) edited a new edition of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men for Harcourt Brace. Noel is also editor of The Mississippi Quarterly.