Braudy to give Capen lecture in humanities
Analyst of cultural history to speak about meaning

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

According to Leo Braudy, we live in a celebrity-obsessed society with little sense of history.

An analyst of cultural history, literature and film, Braudy has in one exceptional book documented the role and meaning of celebrity icons of the past. He now is at work chronicling the historical meanings of "masculinity" and how it has influenced and been influenced by cultural change in Western societies.

On Oct. 26, Braudy, who is professor and chair of the English Department at the University of Southern California, will deliver the 1999 Samuel P. Capen Lecture in the Humanities.

The lecture, "War and Masculinity: Notes on the History of an Assumption," will take place at 4 p.m. in the Screening Room of the Center for the Arts on the North Campus. The event is sponsored by the Samuel P. Capen Chair in the Humanities held by Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences.

It will be free of charge and open to the public.

The Capen lecture is the university's major public lecture in the humanities and is presented each year by a major scholar whose subject will interest faculty, students and the general public.

Braudy says the "assumption" to which he refers in the title is that somehow men and war go together. Similar popular beliefs are expressed in jokes about testosterone and the like, he says, noting that all of us hold beliefs about what masculinity is and is not.

"I'm writing a book on that subject," says Braudy. "It looks at whether changing cultural attitudes toward masculinity can be mapped historically in terms of major wars, changes in war technology, the relation of the soldier to the rest of society, the makeup of armies."

Jackson says Braudy is a "perfect choice to be the 1999 Capen lecturer because his talk will raise key questions about gender, violence, ethics, ethnicity, and historical and cultural analysis."

Braudy says: "As feminism has taught us, 'man' is the stable term against which 'woman' has been defined. I want not so much to turn that around as to show how 'man' and 'masculine' are themselves unstable terms shifting with the historical wind.

"Some of the crucial themes in the book are how honor codes, nationalism, and sexuality shape male identity. By the end, I hope to also be able to say something about prevailing perceptions of masculinity in our present post-Cold-War moment."

Braudy notes that one such understanding of manhood is marked by resurgent or last-ditch nationalist movements now on the rise in certain developing nations. He says, however, that as economic globalization erodes national boundaries between developed nations, it may be creating the context for yet another metamorphosis in the meaning of masculinity.

Braudy is best-known as the author of the landmark book "The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History," now in its fourth edition. "Frenzy" spans thousands of years and fields ranging from politics to literature, art and mass media to analyze the men and women who captured their society's attention during various periods of Western history.

In the book, he looks at a broad range of iconic figures-from Alexander the Great to Princess Diana-and discusses how they promoted themselves, the effects it produced and how their stature has shaped our own notions of what it means to lead a public life.

Braudy's scholarship embraces film iconography as well, and the meaning it imparts to our lives. His books on that subject include "Film Theory and Criticism" (with Marshall Cohen), "The World in a Frame: What We See in Films" and "Jean Renoir: The World of his Film."

He is also the author of "Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding and Gibbon," and his writings have appeared in notable journals, including American Film, The Eighteenth-Century: A Current Bibliography, Eighteenth-Century Studies, ELH, Film Quarterly, Genre, Modern Language Notes, Novel, Partisan Review, Prose Studies, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Studies in English Literature and Yale Review