Reynolds Lecturer Asks What Is a Meta For?
2012 E&H Reynolds Lecturer Dr. Robert Denham Asks ‘What’s a Meta For?’
The founder of Iron Mountain Press will address the importance of metaphor to the human thought process when he speaks at the College Wednesday, March 28.
Dr. Robert Denham, an emeritus professor of English at Roanoke College, will invite his audience to move beyond the commonplace notion that metaphor is one of the basic building blocks of literature and beyond the popular view that metaphor is an exotic figure of speech used by poets
Metaphor, Denham argues, is used whenever language is in play, shapes thinking and is at the very heart of conceptual systems.
Denham, an acclaimed Northrop Frye scholar, is the featured speaker for the Richard Joshua Reynolds Lectureship in the Humanities at Emory & Henry. His lecture, entitled “What’s a Meta For?”, begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Board of Visitors Lounge of the Van Dyke Center.
Denham founded The Iron Mountain press in the late 1970s. It published fine letter-press editions of poetry chapbooks and full-length collections by such poets as Robert Morgan, Jeff Daniel Marion, Susan Ludvigson, Jonathan Greene. Some of those publications won national awards for the excellence of their printing.
The Reynolds Lectureship was established through the generosity of the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The lectureship is named in honor of an alumnus of Emory & Henry College, R. J. Reynolds (1850-1918), who attended the College during the 1860s. Mr. Reynolds was noted for his philanthropy in the fields of education and public service in the South.
The lectureship presents annually scholars and artists who have distinguished themselves in the humanities. Reynolds lecturers since 1963 have included such illustrious persons as Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins, poets John Crowe Ransom and Paul Roche, Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, philosophers Sidney Hook, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Jonathan Moreno, literary critics Wayne Booth and Northrop Frye, drama critic John Simon, classicists Peter Arnott, James Redfield, and William Arrowsmith, theologian David Tracy, novelists Chaim Potok and Marge Piercy, composer Randall Thompson, opera critic and translator William Weaver, architectural historian Stephen Murray, playwright Lavonne Mueller, archaeologists Carol and Eric Meyers, poet and rights activist Marjorie Agosin, music critic and historian Nadine Hubbs, theatre arts instructor Grant McKernie, Shakespeare scholar Paul Cantor, bioethics philosopher Carl Elliott, cultural arts critic Dave Hickey, music history scholar Christopher Wilkenson, anthropologist and photojournalist Daniel J. Hoffman, and respected bilingualism and language acquisition expert Dr. Joyce Bruhn de Garavito.
This event is part of the 175th Anniversary Celebration. For more information, visit www.ehc.edu/175.
