Wednesday, April 7, 2004

WRITER: Phil Williams, 706/542-8501, phil@franklin.uga.edu

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, SCHOLARS TO KEYNOTE MEMORIAL SERVICE IN UGA CHAPEL FOR NOTED LITERARY SCHOLAR HUGH KENNER

ATHENS, Ga. – A memorial service for Hugh Kenner, widely considered one of the giants of 20th century literary criticism, will be held in the University of Georgia Chapel on Friday, April 16, beginning at 3:30 p.m. The event is open to the public.

Among featured speakers will be Kenner’s longtime friend, author and political commentator William F. Buckley, and noted scholars Majorie Perloff and Guy Davenport.

Kenner, who spent the last decade of his career on the faculty of the department of English at the University of Georgia, died on Nov. 24 from heart failure at the age of 80. He was eulogized internationally and received a lengthy obituary in The New York Times from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.

Buckley is among the best-known political and literary figures of the 20th century, and has written numerous books on politics and has also penned the popular Blackford Oakes series of spy novels. Davenport is an internationally noted scholar, now retired from the University of Kentucky. His latest book is called The Death of Picasso: New & Selected Writing. Marjorie Perloff is the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita from Stanford University and a prolific critic and writer.

Other speakers include Thomas F. Staley from the University of Texas, author of Reflections on James Joyce: Stuart Gilbert's Paris Journal, among other books; Coburn Freer and Jed Rasula of the University of Georgia department of English, both internationally known scholars and writers; and law professor Marisa Pagnattaro, also of the UGA, who helped work on the Kenner archives before they were transferred to the University of Texas.

Master of Ceremonies will be Barry Ahern, who is a professor at Tulane University and a scholar of literary modernism. Music will be provided by the band Banish Misfortune.

During his career, Kenner personally knew an astonishing number of major figures in 20th century literary modernism. Among his friends and acquaintances were William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. He also wrote a considerable amount of criticism about novelist James Joyce. A polymath with interests in numerous other fields from computers to mathematics, he was also a lifelong friend of Buckminster Fuller.

In addition to a career as a much-honored teacher, Kenner was the author of more than two dozen books, but his masterpiece is widely regarded as The Pound Era, which focused on the rise of literary modernism with iconoclastic poet Ezra Pound as the central figure. One of Kenner’s astonishing feats was to change his writing style to match the style of the person about whom he was writing.

As an obituary of Kenner in The Los Angeles Times noted, “He was a prodigious author, essayist, critic and broadcaster for half a century, writing more than two dozen books, contributing to 200 more and penning some 1,000 articles. A recent bibliography of his writings totaled 414 pages.”

Kenner studied at Yale, where he earned a doctorate working with Cleanth Brooks, one of the leading lights of the so-called New Criticism, which separated texts from their biographical and historical moorings and examined them minutely on their own merits. Kenner served at Santa Barbara College (now the University of California at Santa Barbara) and Johns Hopkins University before coming to the University of Georgia.

Kenner retired from UGA in 1999 but remained active as a scholar and writer, and for years welcomed students and literary scholars into his home to study his huge collection of letters from the famous.

In a commentary in Slate, Jeet Heer wrote this about Kenner:

“Kenner was a slippery writer who evades any easy political labeling. Rather than placing him on the left-right spectrum, it would be better to describe him as a collector of marginalized thinkers and artists: He loved to demonstrate that figures who were dismissed as cranks or freaks did work that has coherence and value. During his lifetime, Kenner's crank collection included Marshall McLuhan, Louis Zukofsky, Buckminster Fuller and [cartoonist] Chuck Jones, as well as Pound and Lewis.”

Kenner’s first wife, Mary Josephine Wait, died in 1964, and together they had three daughters and two sons. He then married the former Mary Anne Bittner (William F. Buckley was best man), with whom he had a son and a daughter.