Dr. Charlotte Beck will present "Still Useful after All These Years: The Turbulent Persistence of The New Criticism" for the third Bleasby Colloquium Thursday, Nov. 15, at 7 p.m. in the Sebastian Mueller Theater of the McKelvey Campus Center at Westminster College.

The event, sponsored by Westminster's Department of English and Public Relations, is free and open to the public. In addition to the colloquium, Beck will lecture English 240 classes Thursday and Friday.

Beck, professor of English emerita at Maryville College in Tennessee, teaches at the University of South Carolina at Beaufort. A nationally known Southern literature scholar, she holds three degrees from the University of Tennessee and has participated in three summer seminars sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

She has published Worlds and Lives: the Poetry of Randall Jarrell; The Fugitive Legacy, a study of the lasting influence of the Vanderbilt Fugitive Movement; and Robert Penn Warren: Critic, a comprehensive study of Warren's critical writing. She is currently working on a two-volume collection of the complete critical writings of Warren.

Her presentation at the colloquium will show the basic tenets of the New Criticism-a process of close reading in literature developed by Warren and his lifelong friend, Cleanth Brooks, in their classrooms and promulgated in Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction-are still valid and useful to students of literature.

The New Criticism, a theory that informed three decades of college-level classroom teaching, came under attack in the last two decades of the 20th century by other schools of literary criticism. Recently, the pendulum of taste and fashion seems once again to be swinging in the direction of the New Criticism as a new generation of students discovers that nothing can replace a careful reading of the text in front of them, according to Dr. James Perkins, Westminster professor of English.

This colloquium is part of the George Bleasby Colloquia, a series of literary events in honor of the late Dr. Bleasby, who chaired the Department of English at Westminster from 1954-75.

Contact Perkins at (724) 946-7347 or e-mail jperkins@westminster.edu for additional information. 

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