Q & A

November 17, 2011 Southern Appalachian Celebration is not just a big book filled with pretty pictures. It’s also laced with big ideas that call for bold actions, a book that poses important questions, literally asking its readers to put themselves in the forest’s place when we consider our role as its custodian. Despite such sentiments, the book never feels like a hippie tree hug. The combination of Chris Bolgiano’s sober, clear text and James Valentine’s resonant images gives the book a Zen-like stateliness that affirms the seriousness of its intentions without insisting on its own seriousness.

November 3, 2011 In Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible, Robert Alter explores the various ways the King James Version and its assimilation into American speech have shaped the literary styles of Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and Marilynne Robinson. Prior to his appearances on November 10 at the University of Memphis and November 11 at the 1611 Symposium at Rhodes College in Memphis, Alter answered questions from Chapter 16 about the way “a set of texts rendered in English four hundred years ago can still fire the imagination of writers who differ extremely from each other and from the Bible.”

October 31, 2011 In Not Here, Not Now, Not That!, Vanderbilt sociology professor Steven J. Tepper challenges any bird’s-eye-view analysis of the so-called “culture war.” Rather than focus on national debates, like those preceding the opening of the controversial Sensation exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999, Tepper concerns himself with hundreds of smaller, local conflagrations––over flags, nativity scenes, statues, banned books, etc.––that occurred across America during the 1990s. By analyzing data collected from these local skirmishes, Tepper discards contentious progressive or traditionalist labels, arguing that it’s more effective to understand––and debate––the nuanced issues that really matter to a community.