About

Victor H. Strandberg is a Professor of English at Duke University, holding this position since 1983. His scholarly work includes publications such as The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren, Religious Psychology in American Literature: The Relevance of William James, A Faulkner Overview: Six Perspectives, and Greek Mind/Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick. He has spent every sabbatical year teaching American Literature abroad, including as a Fullbright professor at the Universities of Uppsala, Louvain, and Mannheim, and in the Czech Republic. Additionally, he has taught at Kobe College in Japan and in Marrakech, Morocco. His academic background includes a Ph.D. and M.A. from Brown University and a B.A. from Clark University. His current office hours are Tuesdays from 1:30 to 3:00 PM and by appointment, including evenings on Zoom.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Theology
• Computer Science
• History
• Art
• Art history
• Literature
• Programming language
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Cracking the Wasp Code: Joan Didion and the Soul Word

  Advances in Literary Study · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • History
  • Computer Science

  “Cracking the WASP Code: Joan Didion and the Soul Word” is a study in Literature and Language. The “Language” component is the idea of the Soul Word, used here as a generic term for words that represent a code of values and behavior that is admired and aspired to in various subcultures. Examples include “Soul” (African-American), “L’Chaim!” (Jewish), “Genutzat” (Armenian), “Sissu” (Finnish), “Dom” (Serbo-Croatian), “Yamato-Damashi” (Japanese), “Machismo” (Hispanic), and—most important for this essay—“Class” (WASP). The “Literature” component of this essay includes definitions and literary excerpts to explain these terms. Among the authors of these excerpts are such writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, Oscar Hijuelos, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and William Faulkner. The main thrust of this essay is to bring this concept (Soul Word) to bear on the contradictory portraits of the main character in Joan Didion’s masterpiece, A Book of Common Prayer. Charlotte Douglas, Didion’s protagonist, is portrayed as a scatterbrain who does not even seem to know whether she and her daughter did or did not see the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen or the rose window in the cathedral at Chartres. In the latter instance, for example, she says her daughter cried upon seeing the beauty of the window; elsewhere she says a British television crew prevented them from entering the cathedral. Yet she sometimes displays exceptional competence and presence of mind, as when she saves the life of a man with an emergency tracheotomy. The bridge between these two portraits, it turns out, is Didion’s deployment of the WASP Code, as I explain in my central argument.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Eliot Agonistes: Betwixt Poetry, Philosophy, and the Harvard Option

  Advances in Literary Study · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Philosophy
  • Literature

  During Eliot’s six-year pursuit of a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard, he was privately ridiculing such mentors as F. H. Bradley, Henri Bergson, Josiah Royce, and Irving Babbitt, most notably in his journal, The March Hare. The crucial issue was their promotion of “the Absolute” (sometimes called “the ground of being),” a concept that Eliot found unable to cope with the sufferings relating to sex and death that are hugely prominent in Eliot’s poetry. Despite these misgivings, he continued his studies in philosophy, earned his doctorate from Harvard, and received an offer to teach the subject there. He kept that offer dangling until his literary career prospered and he could throw Harvard away. Later, his conversion to Christianity, not philosophy, solved the naturalistic problems of sex (he avowed chastity) and death (he believed in the supernatural). Eventually, he taught literature, not philosophy, at Harvard.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ed Chapman: In Memoriam

  Robert Penn Warren Studies · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • History
  PublisherOA PDF

• A Man with No Religion

  DukeSpace (Duke University) · 2012-02-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  s claim that "no writing will be too successful without some conception of God" is exceptionally problematic when applied to Robert Penn Warren.About his upbringing in the Bible Belt along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, Warren said "I came out of it with no religion at all." [Talking with RPW, 381] Toward the latter end of his lifespan, as a man in his late seventies, he gave an interview indicating little change from those earlier years, speaking of himself as "a very nonreligious man."But against the emphatic force of that word "very," in virtually the same breath he also claimed "the deepest awareness of its [religion's] importance" and declared himself "a yearner.I mean I wish I were religious."(ibid, 382) Further complicating his "very nonreligious" sensibility is the "religious sense" that he expressly ascribed to his work, a phrase which he amplified with the claim that his work is "about the quest for religion. " [ibid 382]To judge from his boyhood experience, Warren's quest for religion had an inauspicious beginning.Although he read the Bible all the way through-in fact, he did it three times-he did so because his father paid him to do so, not to foster religious enlightenment in his son but because the Bible, his father said, is "a foundation of society."[ibid 287] At about the age of twelve, Warren apparently did have a religious experience of sorts, but of a misfortunately negative tenor.In his poem "Amazing Grace in the Back Country" (published in Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978), the boy attended a local camp meeting and "knew I was damned,/Who was guilty of all short of murder,/At least in my heart," but instead of heeding the preacher's call to salvation he went outside and vomited in the bushes.Perhaps it was from kindly concern that Warren's father changed his son's reading assignment soon after.Replacing the Bible, Warren recalled, his father "gave me Darwin to read when I was fourteen."[ibid 382-3] From this point on, Warren's record of religious affiliation is decidedly spotty.He has said that during his first year at Vanderbilt University he tried to acquire a religious sensibility but failed.Two decades later his sojourn in Italy produced a mild interest in the Roman Catholic Church, thanks to his studies in Dante and some conversations with Catholic prelates, but he soon realized that his temperament would not allow him to follow Allen Tate's path to conversion.And yet another twenty-plus years after that, when I visited Mr. Warren at his home in Vermont in 1964, he made a comment that indicated a slight instance of Christian belief.When I asked about his reference to the Pentecostal speaking in tongues in Night Rider (in the Willie Proudfit episode) and in Brother to Dragons, where he described "the Pentecostal intuition" as a "Truth-dazzled hour when the heart shall burst/In gouts of glory-hallelujah!," he declared that the tongues are "the real thing"-a genuine religious experience of fairly common incidence

  Publisher

• Letter of RPW to VS, September 1977

  DukeSpace (Duke University) · 2012-02-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This letter from Robert Penn Warren is addressed to Victor Strandberg and is a response to Strandberg's book The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren.

  Publisher

• SOUTHERN COMFORT: RPW AND THE ART OF (THE CIVIL) WAR

  DukeSpace (Duke University) · 2011-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  [Public Lecture Presented at the Robert Penn Warren Circle Annual Meeting in Guthrie, Kentucky, 2011]

  Publisher

• <scp>P</scp> rice, <scp>R</scp> eynolds

  The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction · 2010-12-24

  other1st authorCorresponding

  In 1963 Reynolds Price won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for his first novel, A Long and Happy Life , a book that has now sold over a million copies. From that spectacular beginning, he went on to compose three volumes of short stories, 13 novels, six plays, four volumes of poetry, three collections of essays, three memoirs, and enough religious writing to feature him on the cover of Time (Dec. 6, 1999). In addition to such versatility, Price has published countless book reviews and interviews that disclose a vast array of literary interests and relationships.

  PublisherDOI

• Crackpots on Parade: The Nether Side of Genius & Transgressive Deconstructions

  2010-01-01

  book1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Faulkner's God

  2010-01-01

  book1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Studies in the Literary Imagination, Volume XXXV, Number 1, Spring 2002

  ScholarWorks - Georgia State University (Georgia State University) · 2009-01-01

  other

  13_backmatter.pdf

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• James A. Grimshaw

  Texas A&M University – Commerce

  3 shared

• Elaine M. Kauvar

  2 shared

• Dave Smith

  1 shared

• James H. Justus

  Florida State University

  1 shared

• Frithiof Rundgren

  1 shared

• Dennis Weeks

  Valencia College

  1 shared

• Lewis P. Simpson

  1 shared

• David LaGuardia

  1 shared