Volume 41, Issue 1, November 2007

From the Editor:

I am thrilled with my new role as Editor of the SSSL Newsletter. Thanks to Bob Brinkmeyer, Susan Donaldson, Ryan McDonald (College of William and Mary) and Cassandra M. Edwards (University of Arkansas) for making the transition such an easy one. Let me introduce
myself. As some of you may already know, I am a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, in Canberra, Australia. I am hoping that my presence in the Society will extend its international reach. For this reason, too, it is great that Martyn Bone, author of The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (Louisiana State UP, 2005) and Associate Professor in English at the University of Copenhagen, has started up, with Melanie Benson (University of Hartford), the Southern Literature H-Net, providing southernist scholars throughout the world with a forum to discuss, ask questions, and post calls-for-papers and other announcements. (There is currently a heated debate going on about conservative v. progressive politics and southern literature). This extension of the boundaries of southern literary studies is, I think, a reflection of the impact that the New Southern Studies has had in the field.

As I write this, I am almost at the end of my two weeks as a Visiting Scholar in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, at the University of Mississippi, here in Oxford. I have received a really warm welcome from scholars in the Center, and it has been wonderful to have this precious time to concentrate solely on my research and to meet people in the field, such as Katie McKee, Charles Wilson, Annette Trefzer and Anne Goodwyn Jones, with whom up until now I have only had contact, if any at all, via email. On my way here, I attended the Modernist Studies Association’s annual convention, which was this year held in Long Beach, CA. Jon Smith, Jack Matthews, Katie Henninger, Tara McPherson and Peter Lurie were involved in a round-table, on the intersection between the New Southern and the New Modernist studies. Otherwise, the southern content of the convention comprised several papers on Wright and Faulkner, including a wonderful Faulkner conversation between Carolyn Porter (UC Berkeley) and Seth Moglen (Lehigh University), author of Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism (Stanford UP, 2007).

I wish Bob Brinkmeyer well in his new position at the University of South Carolina, and finally, thank-you to all of you who submitted calls-for-papers and other announcements for this issue. I am looking forward to further contributions for the Spring issue next year, and to the SSSL Conference in Virginia in April.

All the best,

Sarah Gleeson-White

A Message from the SSSL President

Holiday greetings from the College of William and Mary, where we’re eagerly awaiting your arrival for the 2008 Biennial SSSL conference, April 17-20, extended an extra day to accommodate an embarrassment of riches in plenary speakers and session presenters. Last spring, when we sent out the call for papers, the dates had originally been set for April 18-20, so do mark your calendars to include an earlier stating date–Thursday, April 17. I’m happy to announce that the conference will feature three keynote speakers: Frances Smith Foster, co-editor of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature and The Oxford Companion to African American Literature and a leading authority on early African American literature and culture; Minrose Gwin, an eminent Faulknerian, feminist critic, memoirist, and co-editor of The Southern Literary Journal, and Craig Womack, a rising figure in Native American Studies and a novelist as well. Together these three speakers serve as apt representatives of the exciting new ventures in scholarship and writing changing the face of southern cultural studies as we excavate and reconsider narratives and histories of a region whose earliest antecedents have been marked by migrations, transformations, and shifting definitions of home and rootedness–the key themes of our conference. We’re fortunate as

well to have invitations to speak accepted by two exciting creative writers–Allison Hedge Coke, a poet and anthologist of Huron/Metis, Chrokee/Creek ancestry, and LeAnne Howe, a Choctaw playwright, screenwriter, and filmmaker.

Thanks to our intrepid conference manager, Ryan McDonald, a Ph.D. student in William and Mary’s American Studies Program, you can now turn to our SSSL website, which has recently moved from the University of Arkansas to William and Mary, to find out the details about lodging and registration for the conference. Just go to www.wm.edu/english/sssl, and you’ll find information about the conference theme, our call for papers, registration, membership dues, hotel information, and transportation to Williamsburg, which is, admittedly, a bit off the beaten track.

In the meantime, do remember that the deadline for paper and session proposals is December 15, 2007–which is fast approaching. Please send proposals in MS Word to my email address: [email protected]. Our program committee–which consists of Eric Anderson at George Mason University, Suzanne Jones at the University of Richmond, Roberta Rosenberg at Christopher Newport University, and me–will get back to you in January.

In the next few days, you’ll be receiving an email from our secretary-treasurer Jeff Abernathy with the slate of nominees for the SSSL Executive Council. The nominees are Eric Gary Anderson, George Mason University; Melanie Benson, University of Hartford; Keith Cartwright, University of North Florida; David A. Davis, Wake Forest University; Barbara Ewell, Loyola University New Orleans; and George Handley, Brigham Young University. Please take the time to return the ballots with your votes by December 15.

I also wanted to let you know that thanks to Jennifer Greeson’s hard work as MLA session organizer we have two wonderful sessions coming up at the Modern Language Association in Chicago: Session 26: Ending the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1807-2007, will be held on Thursday, Dec. 27, from 3:30 to 4:45 in DuSable at the Hyatt Regency with John Stauffer of Harvard University chairing and papers given by Andy Doolen of the University of Kentucky, Eve E. Dunbar of Vassar College, and Tameka L. Cage of Bucknell University. On Friday, Dec. 28, from 3:30 to 4:45 p.m., I’ll chair Session 326: Filming the United States South, in the Hyatt Regency’s Plaza Ballroom B, with papers given by Abigail Salerno of Duke University, M. Thomas Inge of Randolph-Macon College, and Leigh Anne Duck of the University of Memphis. Finally, the Southern Literature Discussion Group Session (No. 520), in the Hyatt Regency’s Columbus Hall K and L, will focus on The New Southern Studies: Three Responses, with Jon Smith of the University of Montevallo presiding and with Eric Lott of the University of Virginia, Sarah B. Blair of the University of Michigan, and Kenneth W. Warren, of the University of Chicago speaking, respectively, on new books by Leigh Anne Duck, Katherine Henninger, and Riché Richardson. That last session will be held from 1:45 to 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 29.

If I don’t see you at these MLA sessions in Chicago, I certainly hope to see you in Williamsburg April 17-20 for our biennial conference. Until then, I hope you’ll join me in welcoming Sarah Gleeson-White as our new SSSL newsletter editor, a post that she has taken up from what were once the far reaches of Australia but now seem just around the corner under the magic wrought by a decidedly transnational, globalized digital technology.

Susan Donaldson

SOUTHERN ROOTS AND ROUTES: ORIGINS, MIGRATIONS, TRANSFORMATIONS

Society for the Study of Southern Literature Williamsburg, Virginia
April 17-20, 2008

The New Southern Studies is currently revolutionizing the study of the American South by unsettling its histories, blurring once-accepted borders, excavating forgotten stories, foregrounding cultural encounters,
and situating a region once designated as anti-modern within the currents of modernity, postmodernity, and globalization. Multicultural observances of Jamestown’s 400th anniversary and the bicentennial of the closing of the slave trade indicate just two new directions explored by the New Southern Studies, and in recognition of
these two overlapping commemorations and of the
field’s new avenues, the program committee for the 2008 biennial meeting of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature has chosen as its conference theme “Southern Roots and Routes: Origins, Migrations, Transformations,” to be held April 17-20, 2008, at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

We’ve borrowed the theme from the contact zone perspectives developed by Mary Louise Pratt and in particular James Clifford, the latter of whom takes issue with traditional concepts of culture by juxtaposing dwelling and travel, stasis and displacement, separation and reciprocity. In this day of ongoing debates on slave reparations, contested memories and commemorations, and shifting cultural identities, then, it seems highly appropriate to hold a conference foregrounding diasporas and homelands, foundings and migrations, at the College of William and Mary, which originally included an Indian school, relied upon slave labor, trained generations of Colonial, Revolutionary, and Early National leaders, participated in the slavery/anti-slavery debate, and housed Union troops during the Civil War.

Program committee members Eric Anderson, Suzanne Jones, Roberta Rosenberg, and Susan Donaldson welcome both session proposals and individual paper abstracts addressing the theme of roots and routes, settlement and travel, tradition and transformation.

Please send two-page session proposals and/or one- page individual paper abstracts by December 15, 2007, to Susan Donaldson’s email address at the College of William and Mary ([email protected]).

Among the topics session and individual paper proposals may want to address are the following:

• Native American writers and rethinking place
• Representing and contesting slavery
• Colonial encounters on the Eastern seaboard
• Caribbean connections
• Traveling and artistic identity
• Literary communities in the twentieth-century South
• Contested representations of Native Americanantecedents
• Blues, bluegrass music, and southern migrations
• Contemporary Asian American writing in the South
• Film and the new multicultural South
• Early African American writing and reclaiminghistory
• Cultural traumas and contested histories
• Photography and reform
• Tourism and tourist sites
• Families, kith, and kin
• Indian Removal and its aftermath
• Maroon communities and cultures
• New ethnic literatures
• Teaching the new southern studies
• Remaking Native American identities
• Civil Rights histories and novels
• Reclaiming Appalachia
• Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism
• Borderlands in the South
• Sun Belt cities and urban life
• Novels of migration

Jan Whitt announces the publication of a new collection of essays on Carson McCullers: Reflections in a Critical Eye: Essays on Carson McCullers (University Press of America, October 2007) is intended to appeal both to scholars of Carson McCullers and to those unaffiliated with colleges and universities who read and celebrate her work. The collection, which was initiated in 1997 by Keith E. Byerman, professor of English and Women’s Studies in the department of English at Indiana State University, was edited
and compiled by Jan Whitt, associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Those who contributed their work are from community colleges, private universities, and research institutions; they live and teach in geographic locations as diverse as Colorado and Tennessee and Australia; and their research interests range from biography to literary analysis. Articles deal primarily with The Ballad of the Sad Café, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and
The Member of the Wedding, although authors allude extensively to other works by McCullers, especially Clock Without Hands, The Mortgaged Heart and the Collected Stories of Carson McCullers.

Following an introduction for newcomers to Southern literature and culture and to McCullers’ life and work, the collection presents essays about topics such as father-daughter relationships, gender issues, nonfiction prose by Southern women writers, and carnival and masquerade.

Will Brantley places McCullers in the tradition of Southern women’s nonfiction prose; Byerman discusses daughters as outlaw figures in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding; Caroline Carvill deals with gender and the interplay among the roles characters assume in The Ballad of the Sad Café; and Ellen Lansky relies heavily on The Ballad of the Sad Café to explore alcohol as
an important signifier in McCullers’ life and work. Sarah Gleeson-White analyzes the phenomenon of masquerade in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Ballad of the Sad Café; Allison Pingree’s essay about The Member of the Wedding deals with the desire for connection that propels many of McCullers’ characters; Whitt discusses portrayals of same-sex relationships in McCullers’ novels and short stories; and Patricia Yaeger analyzes the political backdrop in McCullers’ most well-known works.

Most of the essays in the collection are original, including those by Brantley, Byerman, Carvill, Gleeson-White, Lansky, and Pingree. Essays by Whitt and Yaeger are drawn at least in part from previously published journal articles or from books. Portions of Whitt’s articles were published in Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South and Journal of Homosexuality. Yaeger’s essay is drawn from Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

Publication of the collection is first and foremost a tribute to McCullers, whose first novel made her a wunderkind and whose canon during her all-too-brief life established her as a significant figure in American literary studies. “I take the liberty of speaking for all the contributors to this book when I say that it’s impossible to measure the impact of Carson McCullers’ life and work on each of us, either personally or professionally,” Whitt said.

The book (ISBN 0-7618-3894-5) is $27 per copy.

SELECTED RECENT SCHOLARSHIP IN SOUTHERN LITERATURE

Leder, Priscilla. “Julia Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister Mary: Breath, Birth, Boundaries.”

Moberly, Kevin. “Toward the North Star: Eudora Welty’s ‘A Worn Path’ and the Slave Narrative Tradition.”

Piacentino, Ed. “Fetching the Old Southwest in Mexico: The Humorous Letters of C. M. Haile.”

Ryan, Tim. “Designs Against Tara: Frances Gaither’s The Red Cock Crows and Other Counternarratives to Gone with the Wind.”

Smith, Thomas Ruys. “Independence Day, 1835: The John A. Murrell Conspiracy and the Lynching of the Vicksburg Gamblers in Literature.”

The Southern Literary Journal

Collado Rodríguez, Francisco. “Minimalism, Post- Humanism, and the Recovery of History in Bobbie Ann Mason’s Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail.” 39.1 (2006) 98-118.

Demirtürk, E. Lâle. “Writing the Urban Discourse into the Black Ghetto Imaginary: Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was A Number Runner.” 39.1 (2006) 71-82.

Folks, Jeffrey J. “The Fierce Humanity of Morgana: Welty’s The Golden Apples.” 39.1 (2006) 16-32.

Hardin, Michael. “Between Queer Performances: John Kennedy Toole’s The Neon Bible and A Confederacy of Dunces.” 39.2 (2007) 58-77.

Himmelwright, Catherine. “Gardens of Auto Parts: Kingsolver’s Merger of American Western Myth and Native American Myth in The Bean Trees.” 39.2 (2007) 119-39.

Jarrett, Gene Andrew. “‘For Endless Generations’:

Myth, Dynasty, and Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow.” 39.1 (2006) 54-70.

Jones, Suzanne Whitmore. “The Southern Family Farm as Endangered Species: Possibilities for Survival in Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer.” 39.1 (2006) 83-97.

Lancaster, Ashley Craig. “Weeding Out the Recessive Gene: Representations of the Evolving Eugenics Movement in Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre.” 39.2 (2007) 78-99.

Locklear, Erica Abrams. “‘What Are You?’: Exploring Racial Categorization in Nowhere Else on Earth.” 39.1 (2006) 33-53.

Messer, H. Collin. “Exhausted Voices: The Inevitable Impoverishment of Faulkner’s ‘Garrulous and Facile’ Language.” 39.1 (2006) 1-15.

Wright, Susan P. “Contextualizing African American Characters in Glasgow’s The Battle-Ground.” 39.2 (2007) 24-36.

Southern Spaces: An internet journal and scholarly forum

Anderson, Eric Gary. “On Native Ground: Indigenous Presences and Countercolonial Strategies in Southern Narratives of Captivity, Removal, and Repossession.” 9 Aug 2007. http://www. southernspaces.org/contents/2007/anderson/1a. htm

Piacentino, Ed. “The Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction: Victor Séjour’s ‘The Mulatto’.” 28 Aug. 2007. http://www.southernspaces.org/ contents/2007/piacentino/1a.htm

Womack, Craig. “Baptists and Witches: Multiple Jurisdictions in a Muskogee Creek Story.” 17 Jul 2007. http://www.southernspaces.org/ contents/2007/womack/1a.htm

Do you have ideas for future Newsletters? If so, let us hear from you!

SELECTED RECENT SCHOLARSHIP IN SOUTHERN LITERATURE

For Inclusion in the Upcoming SSSL Newsletter:

Please mail submissions to:

Dr. Sarah Gleeson-White, SSSLN Editor School of Humanities and Social Sciences University of New South Wales
Australian Defence Force Academy Canberrra ACT 2600

AUSTRALIA

Or E-mail to: [email protected]

DEADLInE FOR SPRInG 2008 ISSUE: May 9, 2008

Please include your name and affiliation. Submit information in any of the following categories.

• News items from SSSL president, officers, panel organizers
• Books or articles published recently (please provide complete citation)
• Teaching Southern literature—special notices
• Requests for information
• Awards or other distinctions
• Calls for papers
• News of graduate studies
• Other items of interest to SSSL membersIf you are organizing a panel for upcoming conferences/symposia, please provide complete information.