Bruce Weiner

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4/11/11

Hawthorne's View Of England Offered In SLU's Piskor Lecture By Prof. Weiner

CANTON - St. Lawrence University Professor of English Bruce Weiner will give the 2011 Frank P. Piskor Faculty Lecture, titled "Our Old Home: Decolonization, Displacement and National Identity in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Sketches of England," on Wednesday, April 20, at 7:30 p.m. in Eben Holden. The event is open to the public, free of charge.

Weiner has been researching the literary expression of alienation, displacement and exile in 19th century America. He states, "Usually the literary formation of American identity is associated with narratives of redemption, of worldly success and/or spiritual transcendence achieved through earnest effort and virtuous actions. But American writers and the stories they tell are often troubled by a sense of detachment from place and a corresponding anxiety about completion and coherence, Hawthorne among them. America, in other words, seems to offer more promise than fulfillment. Freedom is sometimes represented as state of geographical, social and psychological instability. Americans are perpetually 'on the road,' or, as a recent movie characterizes them, Up in the Air."

Weiner is a graduate of Princeton University and earned the Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in 18th- and 19th-century American literature and is the author of The Most Noble of Professions: Poe and the Poverty of Authorship (1986). His essays on Edgar Allan Poe have appeared in several volumes, and he has also written introductions to Wordsworth editions of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Washington Irving's The Sketchbook.

The Piskor Faculty Lectureship was established in 1979 to encourage original and continued research among St. Lawrence faculty members, to recognize and honor distinguished scholarship and to afford the opportunity for faculty to share their learning with the academic community.

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