Southern Renaissance

Unit 13 SOUTHERN RENAISSANCE Reinventing the South Authors and Works achieved popularity and/or critical acclaim during their lifetimes, but faded into obscurity for years Featured in the Video: before being “rescued” by later critics who recog- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying and Absalom, nized their achievements as among the greatest in Absalom! (novels) American literature. What accounts for such a roller Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored coaster of critical reception? What does the uneven Me” (essay) and Their Eyes Were Watching God critical reception of these writers tell us about (novel) American “literature” and what constitutes “great- ness”? How do the different social and economic Discussed in This Unit: backgrounds of writers in the Southern Renais- John Crowe Ransom, “Bells for John Whiteside’s sance influence what and how they write? Daughter,” “Here Lies a Lady,” “Philomela,” I What is “the South” for writers of the Southern “Piazza Piece,” and “Janet Waking” (poems) Renaissance? How is “the South” both place and Katherine Anne Porter, “Flowering Judas” (short time, and how does it relate to “the North” and the story) United States more generally? Thomas Wolfe, “The Lost Boy” (short story) I What stylistic and thematic interests do Robert Penn Warren, “Bearded Oaks,” “Audubon,” Southern Renaissance writers have in common? “American Portrait: Old Style,” “Acquaintance How do these writers attempt to connect the past with Time in Early Autumn,” “Mortal Limit,” and and the future via style and theme? “After the Dinner Party” (poems) I How does the myth of the “Old South” appear Richard Wright, “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” to the writers of the Southern Renaissance? How do (short story) these writers portray the “New South”? In what Eudora Welty, “Petrified Man” (short story) ways do Southern Renaissance writers imagine or Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (play) create a new “New South”? Flannery O’Connor, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and “Good Country People” (short stories) Learning Objectives After students have viewed the video, read the head- Overview Questions notes and literary selections in The Norton An- thology of American Literature, and explored re- I How do Southern Renaissance writers portray lated archival materials on the American Passages American identity differently from writers from Web site, they should be able to other regions? How do Southern Renaissance writers use race, class, and gender as part of identity? 1. discuss and understand both why and how his- What roles do history, tradition, and heritage play torical time (in the sense of past, present, and in the work of these writers? future) became such a dominant preoccupation I Many writers of the Southern Renaissance for writers of the Southern Renaissance; 2 UNIT 13, SOUTHERN RENAISSANCE 2. see and discuss the particular ways writers of the that fewer people lived in rural than urban areas, Southern Renaissance engaged various concepts and as the focus of American life moved to the cities, around which southern society was organized, the consumption of mass-produced goods became including gender, race, social and economic posi- every bit as important as their production. tion, agrarian vs. urban ways of life, and tradition Historians sometimes refer to the massive social vs. innovation or “progress”; and cultural transformations of the early twentieth 3. understand the thematic and stylistic innovations century as distinctively “modern.” For many—and introduced and/or employed by writers of the especially for many writers during the period—such Southern Renaissance and how these innovations great change and social upheaval raised the ques- relate to literary modernism and literary history tion: What kind of life is the best to live? Is the more generally; “modern” world headed in the right direction, or are 4. recognize the attempts of Southern Renaissance we going the wrong way? For writers in the South, writers to create “the South” (or at least small such questions often involved a desire to protect tra- pieces of it) as both a place and a constellation of dition and myth from being destroyed by the influx values and experiences. of new ways of thinking and living. Such questions found expression in attempts by social reformers to legislate the kind of society they wished to inhabit. One prominent result of such Instructor Overview efforts was the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which, from 1919 to 1933, banned the For many people in the United States, the first half manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicants of the twentieth century was a period of tremendous throughout the nation. According to historian change in almost every facet of life. Breakthroughs Michael Parrish, “The prohibition battle divided the in science—including Albert Einstein’s theory of rel- nation along sharp geographic, religious, and ethnic ativity, as well as the increasing influence of Charles boundaries that defined much of America’s political Darwin’s theories of evolution—challenged conven- landscape” in the years following World War I. tional views of both the world we live in and our Specifically, the passage of the Eighteenth Amend- place within it. In the social sciences, the increas- ment “symbolized the political and cultural victory ingly popular ideas of Sigmund Freud became con- of the small towns over the big cities; of evangelical ceptual tools used by many to question the sexual and pietistic Protestants over Roman Catholics, and social restraints of a tradition-bound culture Lutherans, and Jews; of old-stock Anglo-Saxons they saw as highly repressed. Meanwhile, technolog- over newer immigrants; and finally, of rich over ical advances began to create the vast array of con- poor.” Like the Eighteenth Amendment, the count- sumer goods we take for granted today, including less “Jim Crow” laws that divided the South into movies, automobiles, airplanes, radios, and myriad black and white were also attempts to legislate a cer- other items—all produced on a massive scale previ- tain kind of society—in this case, one based on the ously unknown in human history. The industry racial divisions that had segregated U.S. society needed to produce all these goods helped accelerate since the introduction of slavery nearly three cen- yet another great shift in American life as people turies earlier. The Ku Klux Klan, which had virtually migrated in ever greater numbers from their tra- disappeared in the first decade of the twentieth cen- ditional, rural homes—where agriculture was the tury, was reborn in 1915 and remained a formidable main focus of life—to the ever-expanding urban, force in U.S. politics and race relations—particular- industrial centers, such as Charlotte, North Caro- ly in the South—for the next ten years. lina, and Atlanta, Georgia. However, much of this Unit 13, “Southern Renaissance,” explores some migration was from the South to the booming cities of the ways writers who either lived in, wrote about, of the North—notably Chicago and New York—a or were otherwise associated with the South trend that began around the time of the Civil War between 1920 and 1950 responded to the many and continued into the mid-twentieth century. The changes during the period. Not surprisingly, much period marked the first time in American history of the writing in this unit features the struggle UNIT 11, INSTRUCTORMODERNIST PORTRAITSOVERVIEW 3 between those who embraced social change and early twentieth century? Unit 13 helps answer these those who were more skeptical or challenged social and related questions by situating Faulkner and change outright. According to literary critic Richard Hurston within their literary and historical con- H. King, “The writers and intellectuals of the South texts, and by guiding students to connections after the late 1920s were engaged in an attempt to between these writers and others in their era, as come to terms not only with the inherited values well as to writers within other units. of the southern tradition but also with a certain way Through an exploration of the historical and lit- of perceiving and dealing with the past, what erary contexts with which the Southern Renais- Nietzsche called ‘monumental’ historical conscious- sance was most concerned, the video, the archive, ness.” In the work of John Crowe Ransom, Zora and the curriculum materials work together to give Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, students a broad understanding of “the South” with- Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wright, Katherine in the larger fabric of U.S. history in the early twen- Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, and tieth century. Those contexts include (1) the goals, Flannery O’Connor, the diverse wealth of voices in values, and influence of the literary group known the early-twentieth-century South comes alive. as the “Southern Agrarians”; (2) the extensive and The video for Unit 13 explores some of the most complicated history of racial segregation in the influential texts from William Faulkner and Zora South as maintained by “Jim Crow” laws and Neale Hurston, both of whom situate their writing etiquette; (3) the rise of the motion picture as popu- firmly within the South even as they question south- lar entertainment and the ways in which mass ern myths and traditions. Both Faulkner and culture began to reshape American life; (4) the ways Hurston are concerned with questions of historical in which the increasing ubiquity of automobiles and time: How does the past shape the present and an improved national highway system increased future? To what extent are our lives predetermined geographic mobility and encouraged the breakdown by our skin color, economic situation, or what our of local isolation; and (5) the system of tenancy ancestors have or have not done? In Faulkner’s farming, or sharecropping, under which many of Absalom, Absalom!, for example, multiple narrators the South’s poorest inhabitants—both black and attempt to discover, understand, and cope with the white—labored in the early twentieth century.

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