A visiting professor will address the American South’s association with a literary tradition lionizing dying civilizations today in the Doudna Fine Arts Center Lecture Hall.

Michael Goode, associate professor and chairman of the department of English at Syracuse University, will deliver the lecture titled “The Sir Walter Disease: Reenacting American History After Walter Scott,” in affiliation with Phi Beta Kappa academic fraternity.

Suzie Park, associate professor of English and president of the Eastern Illinois Phi Beta Kappa association, said this will be the 21st annual Phi Beta Kappa lecture at Eastern, in spite of the fact that Eastern does not have an official chapter on campus.

Goode said that Sir Walter Scott was a 19th Century Scottish author who wrote historical novels emphasizing the romantic aspects of cultures, especially the Scottish, during their demise at the hands of modernity.

“In the eyes of some people the novels kind of glorify regional cultures at the moment of their twilight,” Goode said. “They produce identification and nostalgia for the culture about to be lost.”

Scott’s novels had a Harry Potter-like following and were part of standard education across continents during the 1800s, Goode said.

“Walter Scott is not a name on the tip of the tongues of many people today,” he said. “It was really only in the early 20th Century that his literary star fell.”

Goode said that while Scott never wrote directly about the South, his ideas had a profound effect on the Antebellum South, who saw themselves as civilized people being prayed upon by the modernized North.

“The title (of the lecture) refers to the American South having a Walter Scott disease,” Goode said. “Their thinking of history was affected by Scott’s historical novels, it influenced their perception of self.”

Goode said he became interested in Scott’s influence in America after a trip to colonial Williamsburg where he saw a visitors film made in the 1950s that described the experience of the site’s historical residents.

He said he was interested in why a film from the 1950s was still being used to tell the history.

“This led to this broader project where I looked over the influence of Scott and the memory of American history and how the formula and plot and stance is informed by these really old novels,” Goode said.

Goode said he will describe in his lecture how Scott’s influence remains present today throughout the country in the designs of museums and historical reenactments.

“Part of what the talk is about is some of the lingering ways in which this stuff still shows up in American culture,” Goode said. “I’m talking in theoretical terms what it means when you reenact history.”

“The Sir Walter Disease: Reenacting American History after Walter Scott” is free and takes place at 7 p.m. today in the Doudna Fine Arts Center Lecture Hall.

Andrew Crivilare can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].