Sense of Place: Literary and Visual Texts of the American South Diplomarbeit zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Magistra der Pholosophie an der Geistwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz vorgelegt von Tina PUKŠIČ am Institut für Amerikanistik Begutachter: Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Walter Hölbling Graz, 2014 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Prof. Walter Hölbling for his academic guidance and patience. I dedicate this paper to my parents, who waited patiently and with belief for my academic product, to my grandmother, who told me the stories and showed me the photographs. Tina Puksic, Graz, January, 2014 2 All art reflects us in our time, in our place. Fiction wrests out of life some inner truth about ourselves in our society. It achieves its moral power when it faithfully reveals us to ourselves, shows us our society in its full and larger context. (Eudora Welty) 3 Table of Contents 1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 5 2 20th-century Southern literature and photography in context ...................................... 11 2.1 Southern (literary) tradition and ‘sense of place’ in context ...................................... 11 2.1.1 The Southern ‘sense of place’ ........................................................................ 14 2.2 The intersection of literary and visual texts and is there a southern photography tradition? ............................................................................................................................... 15 3 Southern Renascence ......................................................................................................... 18 3.1 The Agrarian ideas and their influence on the literary tradition ................................ 18 3.2 Neo-Agrarians and the influence of ‘Weltyan sense of place’ ................................... 20 3.2.1 Eudora Welty’s place in fiction ...................................................................... 20 3.2.2 Eudora Welty’s sense of place in Losing Battles ........................................... 22 3.3 Documentary and nostalgic photography of the American South from 1930s to 1950s 26 3.3.1 The South as documented through the lens by Evans and Welty .................. 27 3.3.2 Laughlin’s nostalgic illumination and visual poetry of the southern past ...... 40 4 Postsouthern ‘sense of place’ and ‘placelessness’ ........................................................... 44 4.1 Challenging southern (literary) traditions .................................................................. 44 4.1.1 Harry Crews’ ‘sense of place (-lessness)’ in A Feast of Snakes and the death of southern literature ........................................................................................................ 48 4.2 Contemporary southern photography ......................................................................... 52 4.2.1 Sally Mann’s nostalgic vision of the contemporary South............................. 55 4.2.2 Deborah Luster’s Louisiana outcasts ............................................................. 61 5 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 65 6 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 67 7 Webliography ..................................................................................................................... 69 8 List of Photographs ........................................................................................................... 71 9 Abstract .............................................................................................................................. 72 4 1 Introduction Sense of place is a concept very much associated with the culture and arts of the American South. “It is a truth universally acknowledged among southern literary scholars that “the South” and “southern literature” have been characterized by a “sense of place […] and it has been […] integral to southern literary and cultural discourse […] (Bone, 1974/2005: vii).” Southern culture, including southern literary tradition as well as southern photography, has been notable for the concept “sense of place” since the beginning of the 20th century. Although the economic, political, and cultural landscape of the South has changed significantly in the 20th century, which altered the Southern tradition and many contemporary critics question the existence of an indistinguishable southern tradition, the notion or rather nostalgia for that ‘sense of place’ continues to be saturated in the contemporary southern literary and photographic art. The definitions and constructions of ‘sense of place’, never simple and one-fold, have been altered simultaneously with the change of the 20th century South’s political, economical and cultural landscape. The notion of ‘sense of place’ has been invented and developed by the Southern Agrarians and their ideas of the idealized rural South in the beginning of the 20th century, with the emergence of the movement called the Southern Renascence. The notion was constructed out of the fear of losing the distinguishable Southern culture based on agriculture, which was in danger of disappearing due to the rise of industrialism, mechanism and capitalism. The Agrarians basically propagated the Southern tradition by emphasizing its connection to nature and land, uniqueness, sense of community, unity, traditional values and family (the main elements that constitute the Southern sense of place) and with this ‘propaganda’ they created a stronger sense of awareness among the Southern writers. This sense of place was then further developed and given a wider and artistic dimension by the Neo-Agrarian group of writers and critics, among which the most prominent was Eudora Welty. With her literary thought, which she developed from the Agrarian ideas and gave them a more artistic literary dimension, she greatly influenced the (literary) Southern cultural thought, and although the South had already been transforming by the emerging industrialization, critics were so thrilled about her work based on Southern tradition they refused to notice those transformations. 5 With the industrial development and the rise of capitalism, the regionalism or the individuality of certain regions of the USA was gradually disappearing. The economy, society and culture became more indistinguishable from region to region while capitalism and the rise of vertical monopoly along with the mass media were homogenizing the regions of the United States and that the result of that was the loss of the Southern regional identity. The contemporary Southern writer suddenly found himself lost or rather trapped in a Southern literary tradition that could no longer be applied in the changed Southern landscape and needed to find a new voice. The new Southern writers had to consider whether they could still speak from the established southern literary tradition or find their new voice in the transformed contemporary South (cf. Hobson, 1991. p. 1 and 4). While some writers turned to contemporary subjects but still remained the traditional attitudes towards the South (Spencer and Harington), others turned to constructing a new tradition, which as they perceived, was more suitable for dealing with the subjects of the contemporary American South. Critics wonder whether this new tradition can still be labeled as distinctly ‘Southern’ or is it rather indistinguishable from the rest of America. While the contemporary Southern writer grew up in that ‘old Southern tradition, he is aware of it and my findings show that, the new tradition rests on that awareness. The lack of southern self-consciousness presented in the post-southern novel is pointing to the continuation of the presence of ‘sense of place’ in their work as well as the nostalgia thereof. The nostalgia for the ‘sense of place’ and feeling the urge to belonging to a (southern) place lie in the undertones of this lack. While focusing on the literary texts, the following thesis also provides an intersection of literature and photography of the American South, which focuses on the analysis of the Southern traditional concept of ‘sense of place’ also through the representations of southern visual texts. There is a lack of attention to the interpretation and study of southern photography as a distinct art in the United States. It is considered by the critics as indistinguishable from the rest of the photography in America. However, the South offers a whole canon of photographers articulating distinctively Southern themes, however, there is no such thing as “traditional southern photography” and consequently secondary literature on the subject is scarce. Ordering the Facade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women's Writing by Henninger is one of the few studies on contemporary Southern photography, 6 providing a short introduction to the history of southern photography, however it mainly focuses on representation of women through photographic texts and how the images of southern women have helped construct the . However, her study focuses on the representation of women in photography and how these images shape the women’s identities in the South. In addition to the research of the already existing critical literature on the subject of sense of place in southern literature, the study