University Boyd Professor of English J. Gerald Kennedy was named a Bellagio Writing Residency Fellow. He will spend four weeks working on a new book project at the Bellagio Center on Lake Como in Italy.
Kennedy will be one of a dozen scholars, dancers, philosophers and poets to participate in the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency Program, a primary goal of which is to address issues in the world and inspire reflection and understanding of global and social issues.
The book project, which focuses on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, is entitled “Poe’s War on Terror.” Kennedy said Poe’s entire career focused on dealing with terror, so he aspires to relate his writings from the 1830s and 1840s to relate to modern-day terror and the way people manage it.
“It is the nature of our culture to sort of feed on fear and to magnify the effects,” Kennedy said. “So the purpose of this is really to feed into the project of building resiliency in contemporary culture. It’s sort of brazen on my part to think that Poe could actually have something useful to say about people living in the 21st century, but the wild thing is, I think it’s true.”
Kennedy recently published a book called “Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe.” Kennedy said there are many problems erupting in the country right now that were initially embedded in the culture during the formation of our nation. The book discusses the clashing perspectives on what it takes to be a citizen of the United States.
Kennedy uses Poe’s history of writing satirical pieces about America to relate to these ideas. Kennedy said Poe was a writer who thought romanticizing the nation during his time was a bad idea. He said Poe felt true writers should appeal to the whole world.
“I titled the book ‘Strange Nation’ to try to unsettle the notion that the United States is sort of the perfect ideal nation,” Kennedy said. “But the reality is that every nation is strange. There’s a gap between the official public sanitized story of the nation and the reality of its history, where atrocities are covered up, hypocrisies are denied, all of the unsolved problems are kind of swept away.”
Kennedy has been at the University since 1973 and has specialized research interests in Poe and Ernest Hemingway, among other figures in American Literature. He also founded the LSU in Paris program in 1981, which still exists today.
“It’s a great country, and I think it’s already great, but we still have some work to do,” Kennedy said.