University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2019 Appalachian Modernism Brandon Story University of Tennessee, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Recommended Citation Story, Brandon, "Appalachian Modernism. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2019. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/5547 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Brandon Story entitled "Appalachian Modernism." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Bill Hardwig, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Thomas Haddox, Lisi Schoenbach, Derek Alderman Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Appalachian Modernism A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Brandon H. Story August 2019 ii Copyright © 2019 Brandon Story All Rights Reserved iii Acknowledgements One of my favorite stories is Wendell Berry’s “It Wasn’t Me.” In that story, Elton Penn inherits Jack Beechum’s farm, and he inherits a debt that he cannot repay. These people have given me gifts I did not earn and cannot repay: My mom, Kathy, who filled our home with books and music. My dad, Larry, who taught me the value of hard work. My sisters, Angela and Cynthia, who inspire and encourage. Teachers and professors who loved literature and history: Wanda Greer, Ernest Van Huss, Tom Peake, Bill Wade, Stephen Woolsey, Linda Woolsey, and James Bowley; Kevin O’Donnell; and Urmila Seshagiri. Colleagues who offered support and advice: Martin Dotterweich, Chris Slaughter, Chuck Thompson, Wendy Traynor, Tommy Bryant, Pat Flannagan, Laura Hardy, Erin Kingsley, Bill Linderman, Kyle Osborne, Craig Streetman, Shannon Vance, Karen Rohr, David Robinson, Beatriz Macione, and Kevin DeFord. Friends who checked in on me: Dave Welch, Penny Moore, Michael Moore, and Jason Slayton. Administrators who pushed and then pulled for me: Katie Vande Brake, Han Ong, and Matt Roberts; Karen Shaw, Dale Brown, Dick Ray, and Whit Whitaker. King University for the sabbatical time, and the Appalachian College Association for the funding. Librarians at King for books and patience, particularly Marika Kimmerer, Keri-Lynn Paulson, and Emily Krug. The community of artists and musicians around ETSU and the Down Home for lighting up Appalachian art, music, and literature: Ed Snodderly, Roy Andrade, Danny Julian, Phil Leonard, Christine Murdock, Eugene Wolf, Ted Olson, and Jo Carson. To my excellent committee for exciting ideas and high standards: Lisi Schoenbach, Tom Haddox, and Derek Alderman, and the best advisor I could have had, Bill Hardwig. To my kids: Penn, Sam, and Bea. To Mariel. And to Craig McDonald, Tess Lloyd, and Bill Hardwig for the gifts of wisdom, humility, and joy in their lives and their teaching. iv Abstract This dissertation argues that instead of being stuck in time as it is so often characterized, Appalachia experienced the same forces of modernization as the rest of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, during the period of roughly 1900-1950, Appalachia produced novels, poems, buildings, and bureaucracies that stand as significant works of American modernism and reflect the changing Appalachian culture and landscape that created them. Some of these were written or crafted by people outside Appalachia about Appalachia, some by artists who remained in the mountains. These works, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater; Martha Graham and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring; Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel; James Still’s River of Earth; James Agee’s A Death in the Family; and the planning and construction projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority, have been analyzed as works of modernism or of Appalachia, but rarely have they been presented as examples of Appalachia’s being a location of modernism. Something about our definition of Appalachia rejects an association with modernism and vice versa. And yet, the major narratives of Appalachia depend on modernity and modernization: resource extraction and industrialization (and now de-industrialization), coal production and its mechanization, outmigration, and mass media dissemination of both Appalachian music and stereotypes. This dissertation recognizes Appalachia as a site of modernism; expands the canon of Appalachian Literature to include examples of modernism and experimental works inspired by modernism; and broadens the Appalachian Studies idea of Appalachia to include a wider range of art and experience. Modernism offers Appalachian Studies a conceptual framework to develop the Appalachian identity beyond victim or survivor of economic and environmental aggression. v Modernism complicates Appalachian Studies’ binaries such as insider/outsider, Appalachian/American, authentic/stereotypical, and perpetrator/victim. Appalachia offers a modernism that both relies upon and reshapes the idea of and the reality of nature; defines and deconstructs the idea of home; and struggles to preserve an old way of life while embracing change. vi Table of Contents Introduction: Appalachian Modernism……………..…………………………………………………….…..…1 Chapter One: Two Myths of Appalachia and Two Appalachian Springs….……………………..26 Chapter Two: Reading Modernism in Appalachian Literature………………….….…………..……74 Chapter Three: TVA’s Electrifying Appalachian Modernism……………………….………….…....126 Chapter Four: Appalachian Postmodernism; Appalachian Metamodernism…………………181 Conclusion: Writing is Rewriting…………………………………………………………………………………..234 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……237 Vita…………………………………………………………..…………………………………………………………….……259 vii List of Figures Figure 1. Appalachian Region Borders………………………………………………………………………….10 Figure 2. Fallingwater over Bear Run……………………………………………………………………………55 Figure 3. Taliesin West…………………………………………………………………………………………………58 Figure 4. Heurtley House……………………………………………………………………………………………..59 Figure 5. Fallingwater’s covered walkway to the Guest House…………………….……………….59 Figure 6. Fallingwater as modernist statement……………….…………………..……….………………62 Figure 7. Wilbur Dam……………………………………………………………………………………………….…148 Figure 8. Wilbur Dam’s simple, streamlined lettering………..……………………………..………..150 Figure 9. TVA’s maxim from South Holston Dam…………………………………………………………151 Figure 10. Watauga Dam Visitor’s Center……………………………………………………………………160 Figure 11. Fallingwater over Bear Run……………………………………………………………………..….161 Figure 12. “Napalm (Can’t Beat that Feeling)”……………………………….……………………………190 1 Introduction: Appalachian Modernism Every hour changes something forever. Or changes something for another hour. Watch the clouds at the far end of the sky, how slowly they move toward you, how the blue above seems inviolable. Watch for an hour and the mottled streak of gray-threaded horizon reaches over like a lid across a box The box you are in feels like history, Permanent change and no warning, Myths of cycles and repetition. The loop you are in is imaginary; It’s a new world every hour. No history here. – Jesse Graves, from “History” In 1929, Carolina Tar Heels recorded a song called “Peg and Awl” that tells the story of a shoemaker1: In the days of eighteen and one, peg and awl. In the days of eighteen and one, peg and awl. In the days of eighteen and one Peggin’ shoes was all I done Hand me down my pegs, my pegs, my pegs. Years and verses pass until the days of eighteen and four, when the shoemaker says he’ll “peg those shoes no more.” The reason: “They’ve invented a new machine/Prettiest little thing 1 The tune, recorded in Atlanta for Victor Records, feature two singers, two guitars, a banjo and a harmonica. By the time this recording appeared on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), Carolina Tar Heel and Bristol, Tennessee native Clarence Ashley had given up music and worked as a manual laborer. The popularity of the Anthology enabled Ashley to return to music. Between 1960 and 1962, Ashley recorded two LPs that introduced Doc Watson. By 1963, he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and can be seen sitting between John Cohen and Doc Watson as they listen to newcomer Bob Dylan. 2 you’ve ever seen.” The machine can “Make a hundred pair to my one/peggin’ shoes it ain’t no fun. Throw away my pegs, my pegs, my pegs.” The workers in the song have been out- performed and made obsolete by the coming of machines. The song follows a similar story to that of John Henry2, the steel-driving man, who raced the steam-drill to tunnel through a mountain. Though they share a setup, these songs pay off in different ways: John Henry beats the steam-drill, but in doing so dies with “a hammer in his hand”; the shoemaker welcomes the machine that puts him out of business, and throws away his peg and awl because “peggin’ shoes it ain’t no fun.” These two reactions to modernization