The World Is Our Home: Society and Culture in Contemporary Southern Writing
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University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, North America English Language and Literature 2014 The World Is Our Home: Society and Culture in Contemporary Southern Writing Jeffrey J. Folks Doshisha University, Japan Nancy Summers Folks Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Folks, Jeffrey J. and Folks, Nancy Summers, "The World Is Our Home: Society and Culture in Contemporary Southern Writing" (2014). Literature in English, North America. 64. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/64 The World Is Our Home This page intentionally left blank The World Is Our Home Society and Culture in Contemporary Southern Writing Edited by J~ey ]. Folks and Nancy Summers Folks THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright © 2000 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 04 03 02 01 00 5 4 3 2 1 For permission to reprint, we wish to acknowledge masculinities 3.2 (1995): 43-66, in which a version of Suzanne W Jones's essay "New Narratives of Southern Manhood: Race, Masculinity, and Closure in Ernest Gaines's Fiction" appeared under the title "Recon structing Manhood: Race, Masculinity, and Narrative Closure in Ernest Gaines's A Gather ing of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying." We also acknowledge Critical Survey 9.2 (1997): 15-42, in which "New Narratives of Southern Manhood: Race, Masculinity, and Closure in Ernest Gaines's Fiction" appeared. In addition, we wish to acknowledge the publication of an earlier version of "Trouble' in Muskhogean County: The Social History of a South em Community in the Fiction of Raymond Andrews" by Jeffrey J. Folks in Southern Liter ary ]oumal30.2 (1998): 66-75. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The world is our home : Society and culture in contemporary southern writing I edited by Jeffrey]. Folks and Nancy Summers Folks. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8131-5607-1 l. American literature-Southern States-History and criticism. 2. Literature and society-Southern States-History-20th century. 3. Southern States-In litera ture. 4. Social problems in literature. I. Folks,Jeffrey]. Oeffrey Jay), 1948- II. Folks, Nancy Summers, 1946- PS261 .S618 2000 810.9'975-dc21 99-089784 This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. § Contents The World Is Our Home: An Introduction 1 Jeffrey]. Folks and Nancy Summers Folks Competing Histories: William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sherley Ann Williams's Dessa Rose 12 Susan Goodman New Narratives of Southern Manhood: Race, Masculinity, and Closure in Ernest Gaines's Fiction 29 Suzanne W ]ones The Snake and the Rosary: Violence and the Culture of Piety in Sheila Bosworth's Slow Poison 53 Gary M. Ciuba "Because God's Eye Never Closes": The Problem of Evil injayne Anne Phillips's Shelter 73 ]ames Grove Gender and justice: Alice Walker and the Sexual Politics of Civil Rights 93 Keith Eyerman "Trouble" in Muskhogean County: The Social History of a Southern Community in the Fiction of Raymond Andrews 107 Jeffrey]. Folks "The Politics of They": Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina as Critique of Class, Gender, and Sexual Ideologies 117 Moira P. Baker Transcendence in the House of the Dead: The Subversion Gaze of A Lesson Before Dying 14 2 John Lowe vi Contents Walker Percy's Lancelot Lamar: Defending the Hollow Core 163 Julius Raper Regeneration Through Nonviolence: Frederick Barthelme and the West 176 Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. Making Peace with the (M)other 186 Barbara Bennett Toward Healing the Split: Lee Smith's Fancy Strut and Black Mountain Breakdown 201 Linda]. Byrd Stories Told by Their Survivors (and Other Sins of Memory): Survivor Guilt in Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster 220 Linda Watts james Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux Novels 232 Frank W Shelton The Physical Hunger for the Spiritual: Southern Religious Experience in the Plays of Horton Foote 244 Gerald C. Wood Richard Ford: The Postmodern Exile and the Vanishing South 259 joanna Price Contributors 273 Index 275 The World Is Our Home An Introduction J#rey ]. Folks and Nancy Summers Folks As james Agee wrote at the beginning of his now classic study of southern sharecropping, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: "The world is our home. It is also the home of many, many other children, some of whom live in far-away lands. They are our world brothers and sisters" (xviii, quoted from Around the World With the Children by EB. Carpenter). In his writing, Agee was greatly concerned with the experiences of southerners from social groups distinct from his own. His artistic practice also insisted on reading literature within the discernible world of historical realities that shaped, and often constrained, the lives of those social groups. Similarly the essays in The World Is Our Home: Society and Culture in Contemporary Southern Writing increase our under standing of recent southern writing in relation to particular social and cul tural issues and to various classes of southern people-the many "worlds" about which Agee wrote. Focusing on southern narrative from the early 1970s to the present, these essays address such issues as racial justice, gender roles, class equality, and cultural alienation. The World Is Our Home thus provides insight into the momentous changes that have taken place, and that are still under way, in contemporary southern society. As we have come to under stand the ways in which southern writers have registered and interpreted this process of change, we may better grasp the South's relationship to larger so cial developments in the national and international culture. From the 1970s on, critical approaches that insist on the contingent and historical nature of literary production have come to occupy a major position in literary studies. The nature of the relationship of literary texts to their social and cultural contexts is suggested, for example, by Stephen Greenblatt's phrase in his essay "Shakespeare and the Exorcists": "the perme ability of [the text's] boundaries" (165). As Greenblatt notes in the same es say, "I believe that the most important effect of contemporary theory upon the practice of literary criticism, and certainly upon my practice, is to subvert the tendency to think of aesthetic representation as ultimately autonomous, separable from its cultural context and hence divorced from the social, ideo- 2 Folks & Folks logical, and material matrix in which all art is produced and consumed" ( 164). In "Criticism and History," Fredric jameson provided an eloquent rationale for the necessity of exploring the "historical dimension" of literature. Jameson wrote that the exploration of the social and historical context "involves what is properly a transformational process, conversion techniques, a shift in men tal perspective that suddenly and powerfully enlarges our field of vision, re leasing us from the limits of the various, purely literary methods, and permitting us to experience the profound historicity of their application, as indeed of all mental operations in general" (577). The World Is Our Home, in its focus on the social and cultural aspects of contemporary southern writing, contributes to the critical endeavor of historicizing and contextualizing liter ary narrative. It is our hope that the essays in this collection will expand the "field of vision" of southern literary studies by illuminating the historical dimensions of contemporary southern narrative. The degree of interest of recent American criticism in social and cul tural approaches can be explained, in part, as a reaction against an earlier formalist bias. The "sociological" approach, as it was sometimes termed, was largely dismissed by a generation of New Critics during the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. In Mark Scharer's well-known essay "Technique as Discov ery" (1948), the author disparaged the need to study "the materials of art" and warned against "the urgent sense of the importance of the materials whether these are autobiographical, or social ideas or personal passions" (391). The climate of New Criticism-much of it, we need not be reminded, an invention of southern critics-deeply influenced the shape of the southern canon as it was first studied, and it determined to a great extent the available critical approaches to that canon. To an important degree, the New Criticism did not favor the study of what was termed "social ideas." In the past twenty-five years, critics of southern literature have redressed the situation in their efforts to focus on social and cultural issues. Indeed, many would agree with the postmodern critic Charles Newman, who writes that he "tend[s] to see cultural and aesthetic conflicts as explicitly social and economic" (12). The South, of course, has always been a region of cultural admixture and often of social and political conflict, but in geographical, so cial, and ideological terms, recent southern writing has become markedly more heterogeneous, a development that compels us to assess more explicitly the relationship of imaginative works to the historical reality that they repre sent and embody.