American Views Abroad


Friday, November 11, 2005
 
The Literary Lynching of Brad Vice

This week the online e-zine StorySouth has been covering the story of Brad Vice, a debut author whose award winning and critically acclaimed short story collection "The Bear Bryant Funeral Train" was stripped of its award and recalled from the bookstores by its publisher, the University of Georgia Press. This appears to be an extreme reaction to questionable charges of plagiarism. As it stands, Vice could lose his position at Mississippi State - a review is currently in progress.

The relevant articles about this in StorySouth:

The literary lynching of Brad Vice (by Jason Sanford)
Support for Brad Vice and a few words on sampling (by Jason Sanford)
Fell In Alabama: Brad Vice's Tuscaloosa Night (by Jake Adam York)

These articles convince me that a gross injustice has been committed against Brad Vice. The mistake he did make and has acknowledged was to omit an explicit credit to the source work. The main points in his favor:

1) The source is implicitly named by the similarity in titles. His story is named "Tuscaloosa Knights" which is based on the chapter "Tuscaloosa Nights" out of Carl Carmer's "Stars Fell on Alabama" (1934).

2) Brad Vice acknowledged publicly on several occasions his debt to Carl Carmer.

3) The story "Tuscaloosa Knights" and the relevant excerpt from Carmer's work were published side by side intentionally at another e-zine some time ago.

4) An established tradition of literary allusion.

I have read the short story in question "Tuscaloosa Knights" as well as the chapter which is alluded to by the similar dialogue and description. Mr. York in his article makes a case for an interpretation of the story in which the allusion to Carmer's work makes the statement that times have not changed at all in Alabama. I have similar impressions of the short story. I quote in part my comment to York's article:

I do think that Mr. Vice has done himself a disservice in giving only implicit acknowledgement to Carmer (through the title), because a reading of his story with explicit knowledge of the allusions adds immensely to the power of the work. I get a sense of the message of hate and how it has remained unchanged throughout the decades. It is a chilling, almost surrealistic feeling of time standing still, though time has passed. This is a theme one encounters in masterpieces such as Rod Serling's Twilight Zone episode "He's Alive", in which a phantom Hitler visits the present to impart upon another his eternal message of hate. In this case it is Hitler's image that is the allusion establishing continuity with the past. That in itself was remarkable for the Twilight Zone series as it seldom made direct references to actual personalities. On a meta-level I think this is analogous to what Mr. Vice intended with his displacement of Carmer's passages.


I think I would add an additional point to the items in Vice's favor:

5) A completely new vision arises out of the incorporation of passages from Carmer's work.

This is far from over for Brad Vice. His employment at Mississippi State is currently under review because of this incident. If you would like to help him, please send your letters of support to the university administration:

Richard Raymond
316 Lee Hall
English Department
Mississippi State, MS 39762

Update Dec. 2nd, 2005: I have written a followup to this article here.

Comments:
Hi Fred--

From today's New York Press:

"If Vice's plagiarizing from Carmer is in fact an homage to Southern literature, then how are we to regard Vice's plagiarizing from Dent? Is it an homage to the screwworm?"

http://nypress.com/18/48/news&columns/RobertClarkYoung.cfm

Care to revise that "gross injustice...against Brad Vice" part of your post?

You were right about one thing. Mr. Vice's troubles are far from over.
 
Anonymous: I wrote a follow-up to your comment at this link.
 
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