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CORVALLIS - Football in fiction will be the focus of an Oregon State University talk on Monday, Oct. 18, by Julian D'Arcy, an associate professor of English who is studying college football in 20th-century American fiction.

D'Arcy's 90-minute lecture, "Taking Football Seriously: Narrative Voice, the Gridiron, and Frank Deford's 'Everybody's All-American,'" starts at 4 p.m. in the OSU Center for the Humanities, 811 S.W. Jefferson Ave. It is free and open to the public. For information, call the center at 541-737-2450 or e-mail [email protected].

D'Arcy is from the University of Iceland in Reykjavik and arrived at OSU in August as part of the Fulbright Scholar Program. He will remain at the Corvallis campus through December.

D'Arcy notes that some readers feel that football fiction seems to be unfairly neglected in comparison with the respect granted to baseball fiction within American sport literature. He argues, however, that the list of authors who have used football themes, stories and characters in their fiction rivals that of baseball writers, and that football novelists have employed as sophisticated literary techniques and complex narrative strategies as baseball authors to analyze and critique elements of American history and culture.

He cites sports journalist Frank Deford's use of narrative voice in "Everybody's All-American," published in 1981, to expose self-deceptions of racism in post-World War II North Carolina.

The lecture is sponsored by the OSU Center for the Humanities.