has sometimes allowed us to believe. The second is a white supremacist vision of Civil War memory, which took many forms early including terror and violence during reconstruction. It locked arms with reconciliationist vision many times and delivered the country an essentially segregated memory of the war by the turn of the century. The third is the emancipationist vision, embodied in African Americans’ complex remembrance of their own truths and in conceptions of the war as the reinvention of the republic and the liberation of blacks. In the end this is a story of how the forces of reconciliation overwhelmed the emancipationist vision in the national culture."

--"For so long after the civil war, Americans faced an overwhelming task of trying to understand the tangled relationship between two profound ideas: healing and justice. On some level, both had to occur. . . . Human reconciliations are a good thing, but sometimes reconciliation comes at a terrible cost. The reunion after so horrible a civil war was a political triumph by the late nineteenth century, but it was not or could not have been achieved without the re-subjugation of many of those people the war had freed from centuries of bondage."

--"As long as we have a politics of race in America, we have a politics of Civil War memory. For Americans, the Civil War has been the defining event upon which we have often imposed unity and continuity. As a culture, we have often preferred the theme of reconciled conflict to unreconciled complexity. "

Dr. Blight's most recent book is Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard UP, 2001).


September 19, 2001
Scholarship on Disability at Emory
Emory's gaining a new scholar of disability studies. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson will join the Women's Studies Program in the spring of 2002. She is the author of Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (Columbia University Press, 1977). For more on Garland-Thomson and the emergence of disability studies, see "Disability and the Academy: A field comes of age" in the December 2000 / January 2001 issue of the Academic Exchange


September 6, 2001
David Lodge Coming to Campus

If you enjoyed Shalom Goldman's review essay in the September Academic Exchange, "Academic Life by the Book: A campus tour of satiric fiction," you'll be glad to know one of the great satirists of academic life is coming to campus soon. Novelist and critic, David Lodge, whose many books include Changing Places, Nice Work, and Small World, will be on campus October 7—10, 2001. He will give three lectures on "Consciousness and the Novel" as part of the series of Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literture. On October 10th, he will give a reading and be available to sign copies of his new novel, Thinks (Viking, 2001). Below is a list of dates and places:

• October 7, 4 p.m.,"Consciousness and the Two Cultures," Woodruff Health Sciences Auditorium
• October 8, 8:00 p.m.,"First Person and Third Person," Goizueta Business School Auditorium, Room 130
• Oct. 9, 8:15 p.m.,"Surface and Depth," Goizueta Business School Auditorium, Room 130
• October 10, 8:15 p.m., reading and book signing, Glenn Memorial Sanctuary.

A Book Jacket Description of Thinks:
"Ralph Messenger is a man who knows what he wants and generally gets it. As director of the prestigious Holt Belling
Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester, he is much in demand as a pundit on developments in
artificial intelligence and the study of human consciousness. Known to his colleagues as a womanizer, he has reached a
tacit understanding with his American wife Carrie to refrain from philandering in his own backyard. This resolution is already weakening when he meets and is attracted to Helen Reed, a recently widowed novelist who has taken up a post as writer in residence at Gloucester. Fascinated and challenged by a personality and a worldview radically at odds with her own, Helen is aroused by Ralph's bold advances but resists on moral principle. The standoff between them is shattered by a series of events and discoveries that dramatically confirm the truth of Ralph's dictum that 'we can never know for certain what another person is thinking.'"