This essay explores how a selection of Flannery O'Connor's short fiction dramatizes, critiques, a... more This essay explores how a selection of Flannery O'Connor's short fiction dramatizes, critiques, and occasionally re-inscribes the mixture of nostalgia, White supremacy, and authoritarianism that permeated her South. Drawing upon Svetlana Boym's concept of restorative nostalgia, it demonstrates how stories such as "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "Judgment Day," and especially the largely unheralded "A Late Encounter with the Enemy" confront Lost Cause ideology. A Whiteness Studies approach is brought to bear on the climactic scene of that story. The essay then analyzes at length the relationship between nostalgia, racism, and the authoritarian personality, as construed by Theodor W. Adorno and more recent theorists, in "The Displaced Person." The story, which situates the desire for a Southern, White supremacist utopia in a post-Holocaust context, serves as a cautionary tale about the lure of authoritarianism-which remains as strong as ever in Trump's America.
This essay explores how a selection of Flannery O'Connor's short fiction dramatizes, critiques, a... more This essay explores how a selection of Flannery O'Connor's short fiction dramatizes, critiques, and occasionally re-inscribes the mixture of nostalgia, White supremacy, and authoritarianism that permeated her South. Drawing upon Svetlana Boym's concept of restorative nostalgia, it demonstrates how stories such as "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "Judgment Day," and especially the largely unheralded "A Late Encounter with the Enemy" confront Lost Cause ideology. A Whiteness Studies approach is brought to bear on the climactic scene of that story. The essay then analyzes at length the relationship between nostalgia, racism, and the authoritarian personality, as construed by Theodor W. Adorno and more recent theorists, in "The Displaced Person." The story, which situates the desire for a Southern, White supremacist utopia in a post-Holocaust context, serves as a cautionary tale about the lure of authoritarianism-which remains as strong as ever in Trump's America.
Upon further review: sports in American literature, 2004
Page 149. Hypermasculinity and Sport in James Dickey's Deliverance Mark S. Grayb... more Page 149. Hypermasculinity and Sport in James Dickey's Deliverance Mark S. Graybill Rarely is James Dickey's most famous novel discussed as sport fiction. This is surprising, given the story's focus on four suburbanites from ...
Nearly a decade after Fred Hobson took the first tentative steps toward defining the postmodern s... more Nearly a decade after Fred Hobson took the first tentative steps toward defining the postmodern strains in contemporary southern fiction, Matthew Guinn presents this study, his first book, to reinforce a few of Hobson's points and to refute many others. Through careful and cogent readings of selected texts by nine fictionists-- including works by Richard Ford, Barry Hannah, and Bobbie Ann Mason also examined in Hobson's The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World (1991)-Guinn convincingly, if at times a little myopically, argues for the radical discontinuity between this emerging body of literature and that produced during the vaunted Renaissance. Even at this late stage of literary history, Southernists have been slow to view postmodernism as a viable current within southern letters, and perhaps in recognition of this fact, Guinn's first chapters are relatively conservative. Adhering to the time-honored principle that southern writing (and, presumably, southern writing about southern writing) should avoid abstraction, he delineates in stark terms a new mode of naturalism present in the "blue collar" fiction of Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Mason. For the figures who populate these authors' worlds, the agrarian or quasi-pastoral values of Renaissance literature are unusable. Amidst the realities of life in the rural south-a life filled with screw worms, raw fertilizer, alcohol, and very palpable violence-the faded plantation culture for which John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Andrew Lytle each pined in his own tortured way becomes, for these working class writers, the kind of abstraction the Agrarians supposedly loathed. "The South of Crews and Allison is a doppelganger to the Agrarians' Arcady; it is impoverished, benighted, and repressive-a sort of Third World antithesis to the pastoral plenty of Agrarian conceptions" (6).This description applies equally well to the milieu depicted by Brown, "the South's preeminent naturalist" (56). And if the Agrarians and their associates found the accoutrements of industrial-capitalist culture dangerous, these writers, especially Mason, find "a progression toward the industrial ... appealing-not as the product of deceptive industrial propaganda or mere laziness but as a result of immediate experience with the portions of rural life overlooked by Agrarianism" (64). From hardscrabble, neo-naturalistic fiction Guinn moves on to consider a more epistemologically, philosophically, and aesthetically sophisticated brand of writing notable for its "mythoclasm"-that is, its subversive treatment of the southern mythology which undergirds Renaissance literature. As he explores the more "abstract" issues raised in the novels of Kaye Gibbons, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, Randall Kenan and Hannah, Guinn gradually and deftly builds the case for a strong postmodern impulse in contemporary southern fiction. References to postmodern parody, the social construction of identity, and a few of Lyotard's ideas increasingly shape the second half of the study. Here Guinn's opposition to Hobson's rather conservative thesis-that though much has been lost to southern writers in the transition from the modern to the postmodern era, much more abides-- becomes most evident. In discussing Richard Ford's The Sportswriter (1986), for instance, Guinn offers a potent, detailed counter to Hobson's claim that Ford's protagonist, Frank Bascomb, is "a cousin of Quentin Compson" and other "such protagonists of upper-class pedigree as Warren's Jack Burden, Allen Tate's Lacy Buchan, Walker Percy's Binx Bolling and Will Barrett, and Taylor's Phillip Carver" (116-17). …
Page 1. ReconstructingLDeconstructing Genre and Gender: Postmodern Identity in Bobbie Ann Mason&a... more Page 1. ReconstructingLDeconstructing Genre and Gender: Postmodern Identity in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country and Josephine Humphreys's Rich in Love MARK S. GRAYBILL For, if the novel, among all poetic forms, can ...
This essay explores how a selection of Flannery O'Connor's short fiction dramatizes, critiques, a... more This essay explores how a selection of Flannery O'Connor's short fiction dramatizes, critiques, and occasionally re-inscribes the mixture of nostalgia, White supremacy, and authoritarianism that permeated her South. Drawing upon Svetlana Boym's concept of restorative nostalgia, it demonstrates how stories such as "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "Judgment Day," and especially the largely unheralded "A Late Encounter with the Enemy" confront Lost Cause ideology. A Whiteness Studies approach is brought to bear on the climactic scene of that story. The essay then analyzes at length the relationship between nostalgia, racism, and the authoritarian personality, as construed by Theodor W. Adorno and more recent theorists, in "The Displaced Person." The story, which situates the desire for a Southern, White supremacist utopia in a post-Holocaust context, serves as a cautionary tale about the lure of authoritarianism-which remains as strong as ever in Trump's America.
This essay explores how a selection of Flannery O'Connor's short fiction dramatizes, critiques, a... more This essay explores how a selection of Flannery O'Connor's short fiction dramatizes, critiques, and occasionally re-inscribes the mixture of nostalgia, White supremacy, and authoritarianism that permeated her South. Drawing upon Svetlana Boym's concept of restorative nostalgia, it demonstrates how stories such as "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "Judgment Day," and especially the largely unheralded "A Late Encounter with the Enemy" confront Lost Cause ideology. A Whiteness Studies approach is brought to bear on the climactic scene of that story. The essay then analyzes at length the relationship between nostalgia, racism, and the authoritarian personality, as construed by Theodor W. Adorno and more recent theorists, in "The Displaced Person." The story, which situates the desire for a Southern, White supremacist utopia in a post-Holocaust context, serves as a cautionary tale about the lure of authoritarianism-which remains as strong as ever in Trump's America.
Upon further review: sports in American literature, 2004
Page 149. Hypermasculinity and Sport in James Dickey's Deliverance Mark S. Grayb... more Page 149. Hypermasculinity and Sport in James Dickey's Deliverance Mark S. Graybill Rarely is James Dickey's most famous novel discussed as sport fiction. This is surprising, given the story's focus on four suburbanites from ...
Nearly a decade after Fred Hobson took the first tentative steps toward defining the postmodern s... more Nearly a decade after Fred Hobson took the first tentative steps toward defining the postmodern strains in contemporary southern fiction, Matthew Guinn presents this study, his first book, to reinforce a few of Hobson's points and to refute many others. Through careful and cogent readings of selected texts by nine fictionists-- including works by Richard Ford, Barry Hannah, and Bobbie Ann Mason also examined in Hobson's The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World (1991)-Guinn convincingly, if at times a little myopically, argues for the radical discontinuity between this emerging body of literature and that produced during the vaunted Renaissance. Even at this late stage of literary history, Southernists have been slow to view postmodernism as a viable current within southern letters, and perhaps in recognition of this fact, Guinn's first chapters are relatively conservative. Adhering to the time-honored principle that southern writing (and, presumably, southern writing about southern writing) should avoid abstraction, he delineates in stark terms a new mode of naturalism present in the "blue collar" fiction of Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Mason. For the figures who populate these authors' worlds, the agrarian or quasi-pastoral values of Renaissance literature are unusable. Amidst the realities of life in the rural south-a life filled with screw worms, raw fertilizer, alcohol, and very palpable violence-the faded plantation culture for which John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Andrew Lytle each pined in his own tortured way becomes, for these working class writers, the kind of abstraction the Agrarians supposedly loathed. "The South of Crews and Allison is a doppelganger to the Agrarians' Arcady; it is impoverished, benighted, and repressive-a sort of Third World antithesis to the pastoral plenty of Agrarian conceptions" (6).This description applies equally well to the milieu depicted by Brown, "the South's preeminent naturalist" (56). And if the Agrarians and their associates found the accoutrements of industrial-capitalist culture dangerous, these writers, especially Mason, find "a progression toward the industrial ... appealing-not as the product of deceptive industrial propaganda or mere laziness but as a result of immediate experience with the portions of rural life overlooked by Agrarianism" (64). From hardscrabble, neo-naturalistic fiction Guinn moves on to consider a more epistemologically, philosophically, and aesthetically sophisticated brand of writing notable for its "mythoclasm"-that is, its subversive treatment of the southern mythology which undergirds Renaissance literature. As he explores the more "abstract" issues raised in the novels of Kaye Gibbons, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, Randall Kenan and Hannah, Guinn gradually and deftly builds the case for a strong postmodern impulse in contemporary southern fiction. References to postmodern parody, the social construction of identity, and a few of Lyotard's ideas increasingly shape the second half of the study. Here Guinn's opposition to Hobson's rather conservative thesis-that though much has been lost to southern writers in the transition from the modern to the postmodern era, much more abides-- becomes most evident. In discussing Richard Ford's The Sportswriter (1986), for instance, Guinn offers a potent, detailed counter to Hobson's claim that Ford's protagonist, Frank Bascomb, is "a cousin of Quentin Compson" and other "such protagonists of upper-class pedigree as Warren's Jack Burden, Allen Tate's Lacy Buchan, Walker Percy's Binx Bolling and Will Barrett, and Taylor's Phillip Carver" (116-17). …
Page 1. ReconstructingLDeconstructing Genre and Gender: Postmodern Identity in Bobbie Ann Mason&a... more Page 1. ReconstructingLDeconstructing Genre and Gender: Postmodern Identity in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country and Josephine Humphreys's Rich in Love MARK S. GRAYBILL For, if the novel, among all poetic forms, can ...
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