Life in Academics

Heilman attended Lafayette College

Lafayette College

Lafayette College is a private coeducational liberal arts and engineering college located in Easton, Pennsylvania, USA. The school, founded in 1826 by James Madison Porter,son of General Andrew Porter of Norristown and citizens of Easton, first began holding classes in 1832...

 and later received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in 1935. Soon after, he began teaching at Louisiana State University

Louisiana State University

Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, most often referred to as Louisiana State University, or LSU, is a public coeducational university located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The University was founded in 1853 in what is now known as Pineville, Louisiana, under the name...

 (LSU). His entry into LSU occurred shortly after the rise of the fugitive poets. Also while he was at LSU, many of his colleagues were influenced by the school of New Criticism

New Criticism

New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...

.

"The Southern Temper"

One example of Heilman's writing is his essay, "The Southern Temper." In this piece, Heilman argues that there are five components to Southern writing. Heilman contests that Southern writing should be valued for its ability to mix theses components into a balanced canon.

1. sense of the elemental: complement to the ornamental, emphasizes the action as unembellished, Ex. violence seen in the works of Faulkner as examples of the elemental.
2. sense of the ornamental: “…the awareness of style as integral in all kinds of communication…” ex. writings of Robert Warren
3. sense of the concrete: writings “…incline not to linger in the realm of theory as such but to hurry on to the exemplary case”
4. sense of the representative: one obligation to the present is to refer to the past
5. sense of totality: “…we do not live alone in time, thrust into eminence, and into finality, by what went before, servile and unentangling” again, importance of the past

External links

• Lafayette article
• Career at Washington