From the Editor:
Well, we did it. The Society has gone digital. I think our new system, with the Newsletter being received electronically, represents a big step forward for us, giving us much more flexibility in terms of getting information out and about and in terms of presenting ourselves to people interested in the organization. Do check out the new website and do make suggestions about what you’d like to see there (see Bill Andrews’ letter for details). We’re pretty much set up to keep it updated regularly. And we’ve got a great webmaster, David Boddie, who is friendly, professional, and very, very talented.
No one needs to tell members about how quickly the fields of Southern literature and Southern studies have been changed and reconfigured in the last several years, but I still marvel at the recent groundswell of work. Most exciting for me are the different contexts in which Southern literature now finds itself– we’re way beyond the simple North/South contrast that for so long dominated much of our discussion and writing. And whose South are we talking about anyway? Whose Souths, I should say. There’s no need to name names and books that were instrumental in ushering in these changes–that can only lead to disaster and pain, as no doubt I would leave somebody out. Let me just say that these are exciting times in the field, and I look forward to the excitement continuing for a good long time.
If my graduate students are any indication, that will certainly be the case. It doesn’t seem to take much–a few books, a little discussion–to generate a tremendous amount of interest in the South. For whatever reason, Southern literature strikes hard and deep. After only a couple of graduate seminars, I’m now working with a number of students preparing their theses and dissertations, and the topics are as varied as the field deserves.
So pardon the gushiness, but I’m having such a great year doing my own work that it’s hard to contain my enthusiasm. I hope you’re as caught up with all these developments as I am.
Enough of all this. We can talk in Chapel Hill. Best wishes to all. Bob Brinkmeyer
A Message from the SSSL President:
I’m very pleased that this letter from the president is appearing in the SSSL’s first electronically published Newsletter. One of the Society’s main goals this year has been to get back on-line after about a five year hiatus. The electronic media that once seemed so imposingly “high tech” have become for many of us about as familiar and essential to our work as our computers. It seems to me intellectually strategic, professionally advantageous, and financially prudent for the Society to have a significant web profile and to conduct more of its work on the web.
Recently I notified the membership of the SSSL of the Society’s new web site: http://www.uark.edu/ua/sssl. Since the summer I’ve been working with David Boddie, a web designer at the University of Arkansas whom Bob Brinkmeyer recommended, to create a web site for the SSSL that would enable us to do several basic things:
1. establish a permanent identity and presence on the web that would inform anyone interested in the literature and culture of the American South of our existence, mission, and activities;
2. keep our members reasonably up-to-date about the Society’s activities, the work of various members of the Society, and the activities of other organizations that share interests and purposes in common with us;
3. give our members an opportunity to interact electronically with each other on matters of teaching, scholarship, and other professional matters relating to southern studies.
What you see on the SSSL’s newly unveiled web site represents just a beginning. We have plenty of creative people in the SSSL who can imagine lots of innovative ways the web site could be adapted to the uses of the Society and its members. Executive Council member Ed Piacentino <[email protected]> has agreed to serve as a liaison between members who have ideas about how the web site might evolve and our new webmaster, David Boddie. Please contact Ed about what you think the web site might do, or do better.
The web site currently features the major activities and programs of the SSSL. The site also offers a convenient way to explore each of those activities and programs simply by clicking on their links. Please note that the Conference link will take you to current information on our biannual conference, which will be held March 26- 28, 2004, in Chapel Hill. Several outstanding people are slated to for lectures and/or readings in plenary sessions at the conference, among them Betty Adcock, Doris Betts, Bill Ferris, Randall Kenan, and Michael McFee. The theme of the conference, PLACE, GRACE, AND RACE IN SOUTHERN LITERATURE, has generated a large number of proposals for intriguing papers and sessions. Scott Romine, chair of the conference program committee, tells me, “It will be a very strong conference – lots of new people who will add a lot, and most of the regulars.”
Please start making plans for our conference in Chapel Hill in March. The web site provides all the details you should need with regard to how to register and how to secure lodging in Chapel Hill during the conference weekend. We’re all looking forward to seeing you!
BillAndrews President
UPCOMING EVENTS & CALLS FOR PAPERS
SSSL Conference
Date: March 26-28, 2004
Location: University of Chapel Hill, North Carolina Theme: “Place, Grace, and Race in Southern Literature”
Web Site: http: //www.uark.edu/ua/sssl
Plenary Speakers: Charles Burnett, Bill Ferris, and Lee Smith
For more information, contact:
WilliamAndrews
Department of English
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC 27599
Email: [email protected] Phone: 919-962-4029
Fax: 919-962-3520
The University of Mississippi will host a symposium on “The U.S. South in Global Contexts,” which will be held February 13-15, 2004. The keynote speakers are Karla Holloway, Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, William R. Kenan, Professor of English and African-American Studies at Duke University, and Marshall Eakin, Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. For more information about this conference, contact:
Annette Trefzer
Department of English University of Mississippi University, MS 38677 Email: [email protected] Phone: 662-915-7685
PCA/ACA
Date: April 7-10, 2004
Location: San Antonio, Texas
Theme: Southern Literature
Website: http://www.h-net.org/~pcaaca Deadline: November 15, 2003
This special session will explore critical interpretations and approaches against the backdrop of popular culture and/or postmodern society. For more information, contact:
Christopher Bloss
Area Chair, Southern Literature, PCA University of South Dakota Vermillion, SD 57069
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 605-677-6615
A collection of essays on Faulkner in the World will be published internationally in 2004. The purpose of this volume is to offer a multifaceted discussion of ways in which different political and cultural settings outside North America affect the reading of Faulkner’s fiction. History and memory, national imaginations, and cultural affinity and cultural differences are the suggested themes for the critical analyses to be gathered. For more information, contact:
Paula Mesquita
Rua Diogo de Castilho 12 r-c Celas 3000-140 Coimbra Portugal Email: [email protected] Phone: 00-351-914-902-559
Queer Eye for the Southern Guy
Despite my frustration with the often tortuous (and torturous) articulations of theory and the elitist posturings that too frequently accompany them, the recent months leave me more convinced than ever of the absolute centrality of queer theory and theories of sexuality in general to southern literary and cultural studies. For better or worse, issues of queerness inescapably persist at our current moment, and we and our students need theoretical frameworks with which to approach these issues.
As the events of this week underscore, debates about homosexual rights and the impact of gay culture seem omnipresent at the national level. On the very day that the over-exposed Fab Five triumphantly returned to primetime television amidst a chorus of grateful metrosexual sighs, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court announced its ruling that gay and lesbian couples have the right to marriage under that state’s constitution. These events,likethoseofabolitionisminthe1830s,arenotquarantinedintheirimpacttoNewYorkandMassachusetts or even the Northeast; rather, repercussions from the Massachusetts ruling will no doubt affect national elections and the legal systems of states across the country. Moreover, that decision was strongly influenced by cases assessing the South’s own vexed relationships with sodomy, such as Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) and Lawrence v. Texas (2003), and has drawn parallels to earlier cases involving the region. A New York Times editorial, for instance, offers that the ban on same-sex marriage “is simply about prejudice, the court concluded, much like state laws barring interracial marriage, which lasted until 1967, when the Supreme Court struck them down in Loving v. Virginia.” Similarly, the hapless straight slobs in desperate need of makeovers and a heavy dose of campy critique may have been exclusively New Yorkers to date, but Queer Eye’s influence is far-reaching. Its audience spans from Richmond to the Rio Grande, as do the viewers of Will & Grace, Boy Meets Boy, and Queer as Folk, as the luscious photospreads in the most recent Vanity Fair remind.
But I seem to encounter as many queer issues (and perhaps more immediately important ones) on the state, local, and personal levels. For example, in Louisiana’s recent groundbreaking gubernatorial election, that with nary a Nazi or convicted felon in the runoff, Democratic New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin faced the group resignation of his gay and lesbian advisory board when he endorsed Republican Bobby Jindal, who refused to meet with the city’s gay leaders. Southern Decadence prompted a storm of controversy this past September regarding public nudity, and both Loyola and the University of New Orleans have recently struggled with homophobic defacements on their campuses. Even (and perhaps especially) in the classroom, the texts themselves repeatedly raise comparable issues. How can one teach A Streetcar Named Desire and Bastard out of Carolina and not deal with the anxious negotiations of queer desire foregrounded in these works? How do we not meaningfully address the comments of the gay student who feels himself too old to be attractive at 22 or of the lesbian student who has been sexually abused?
But what do we make of this broader saturation of queerness? Is this for the better? What of the real, perceived, or anticipated backlashes? I’m not sure that I have definite answers. Certainly the participants at last month’s fifth annual Lambda Literary Festival in Provincetown seemed as perplexed about answers to these questions as I remain. What does Queer Eye for the Straight Guy really signify for American–and southern– culture? Progess? A reinscription of stereotypes? Pure commodification? Are the Fab Five simply McFaggots? And is this representative of the majority of queer-inflected issues? There were multiple and usually contradictory answers, some of which were quite heated.
What the Lambda conference did do quite well, however, was pay attention to the importance of regional identity and southern identity in particular when understood in conjunction with queer identity. The panel on which I participated took up issues of southern queerness and showcased how truly diverse southern gay and lesbian existences and perceptions of them are. Participants represented not only Appalachia, New Orleans, and El Paso but also included the (requisite?) southerner in exile, in this case because of the region’s ostensibly homophobic culture. Both Alfred Corn and Minnie Bruce Pratt, for instance, shared that they maintain households outside the South for this reason. And yet younger southerners, myself included, pointed to the tolerance and even acceptance in specific southern arenas, some of which are the most surprising places. (I invite you for a drink at The Drama Club, the new gay bar in Houma, Louisiana.)
I point to this panel discussion as a challenge to those of us in southern studies and express my hope that we return the favor. If those persons theorizing sexuality and queerness are (even if belatedly) turning their attention to the nexus of queerness and region, then persons theorizing region and southernness perhaps should do the same, informed and enabled by queer theory. This is, after all, what thousands of southerners are themselves unselfconsciously doing on a daily basis. This struck me anew during my long exhausting hours of “research” online. The cyberhandles of gay chatters again and again document this everyday simultaneity of regional and sexual identities: NOLAhairyman, letsplayuptown, HammondCumJunkie, AlgiersBiGuy36, KennerStud, nolapozguy67, boredBRbtm, Houmasexual, to name but a few in my local area. For these men and the many like them, their experiences of the South are inextricable from their sexualities, as encoded in these self-definitions, and we as scholars of these representations need to be informed by theories of queerness to assess and analyze these depictions with intelligence and skill.
Gary Richards
University of New Orleans
SELECTED RECENT SCHOLARSHIP IN SOUTHERN LITERATURE
African American Review
Briones, Matthew M. “Call-and-Response: Tracing the Ideological Shifts of Richard Wright through His Correspondence with Friends and Fellow Literati.” 37.1 (2003): 53-64.
Capuano, Peter J. “Truth in Timbre: Morrison’s Extension of Slave Narrative Song in Beloved.” 37.1 (2003): 95-104.
Costello, Brannon. “Richard Wright’s Lawd Today! and the Political Uses of Modernism.” 37.1 (2003): 39-52.
Itagaki, Lynn M. “Transgressing Race and Community in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go.” 37.1 (2003): 65-80.
Metress, Christopher. “Langston Hughes’s ‘Mississippi– 1955’: A Note on Revisions and an Appeal for Reconsideration.” 37.1 (2003): 139-48.
Myers, Jeffrey. “Other Nature: Resistance to Ecological Hegemony in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman.” 37.1 (2003): 5-20.
Selzer, Linda. “Master-Slave Dialects in Charles Johnson’s ‘The Education of Mingo.’” 37.1 (2003): 105-15.
Thomas,ValorieD. “‘1+1=3’andOtherDilemmas:Reading Vertigo in Invisible Man, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Song of Solomon.” 37.1 (2003): 81-94.
Thompson, Debby. “‘Is Race a Trope?’: Anna Deavere Smith and the Question of Racial Performativity.” 37.1 (2003): 127-38.
Usekes, Cigdem. “‘We’s the Leftovers’” Whiteness as Economic Power and Exploitation in August Wilson’s Twentieth-Century Cycle of Plays.” 37.1 (2003): 115- 26.
American Literary History
Delton, Jennifer. “Before the White Negro: Sin and Salvation in Kingsblood Royal.” 15.2 (2003): 311-33.
American Literature
Edmunds, Susan. “The Race Question and the ‘Question of the Home’: Revisiting the Lynching Plot in Jean Toomer’s Cane.” 75.1 (2003): 141-68.
Higashida, Cheryl. “Aunt Sue’s Children: Re-viewing the Gender(ed) Politics of Richard Wright’s Radicalism.” 75.2 (2003): 395-426.
Orgeron, Marsha. “Rethinking Authorship: Jack London and the Motion Picture Industry.” 75.1 (2003): 91-118.
Ryan, Melissa. “The Enclosure of America: Civilization and Confinement in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!” 75.2 (2003): 275-304.
The F aulkner Journal
Galloway, Patricia. “The Construction of Faulkner’s Indians.” 18.1-2 (2002-03): 9-32.
Johnson, Bruce G. “Indigenous Doom: Colonial Mimicry in Faulkner’s ‘Red Leaves.’” 18.1-2 (2002-03): 101-128.
Lawson, Benjamin S. “The Men Who Killed the Deer: Faulkner andFrankWaters.” 18.1-2(2002-03):179-90.
Mallios, Peter Lancelot. “Faulkner’s Indians, or The Poetics of Cannibalism.” 18.1-2(2002-03):143-78.
More, Gene M. “Chronological Problems in Faulkner’s ‘Wilderness’Stories.” 18.1-2(2002-03):51-68.
Parker, Robert Dale. “ Red Slippers and Cottonmouth Moccasins: White Anxieties in Faulkner’s Indian Stories” 18.1-2 (2002-03): 81-100.
Rhodes, Karen. “The Grotesque Economics of Tragicomedy: Cultural Colonization in Faulkner’s ‘Red Leaves.’” 18.1-2 (2002-03): 69-80.
Sayre, Robert Woods. “Faulkner’s Indians and the Romantic Vision.” 18.1-2(2002-03):33-50.
Winston, Jay S. “Going Native in Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner’s Fragmented America and ‘The Indian.’” 18.1-2 (2002- 03) 129-42.
Mississippi Quarterly
Fossett, Judith Jackson, Adam Gussow, and Riche Richardson. “ASYMPOSIUM:NEWSOUTHS: HoustonABaker, Jr’s Critical Memory and Turning South Again.” 55.4 (2002): 569-612.
Gerhardt, Christine. “The Greening of African-American Landscapes: Where Ecocriticism Meets Post-Colonial Theory.” 55.4 (2002): 515-34.
Nelson, Megan Kate. “The Landscape of Disease: Swamps and Medical Discourse in the American Southeast, 1800-1880.” 55.4(2002):535-68.
Watson, ,Jay. “Economics of a Cracker Landscape: Poverty as an Environmental Issue in Two Southern Writers.” 55.4 (2002): 497-514.
Welling, Bart H. “A Meeting with Old Ben: Seeing and Writing Nature in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses!” 55.4 (2002): 461-96.
Southern Literary Journal
Chalmers, Rebecca. “Untangling the Wide Net: Welty and Readership.” 35.2 (2003): 89-106.
Elz, A. Elizabeth. “The Awakening and A Lost Lady: Flying with Broken Wings and Raked Feathers.” 35.2 (2003): 13-27.
Do you have ideas for future
For the Next Issue . . .
Wilson, Anthony. “The Music of God, Man, and Beast: Spirituality and Modernity in Jonah’s Gourd Vine.” 35.2 (2003): 64-78.
Southern Quarterly
Baker, Barbara A. “Riffing on Memory and Playing Through the Break: Blues in Lewis Nordan’s Music of the Swamp and Wolf Whistle.” 41.3 (2003): 20-42.
Carney, Mary. “Gothic Undercurrents in the Novels of Lewis Nordan.” 41.3 (2003): 78-91.
Dupuy, Edward J. “Music, Mirrors, and Mermaids: Shakespeare and the Transformative Power of Language in Lewis Nordan’s Music of the Swamp.” 41.3 (2003): 43-49.
Guagliardo, Huey. “‘A Life of Loneliness and Oddity’: Freaks, Alienation, and the Consoling Power of Narrative in Lewis Nordan’s Fiction.” 41.3 (2003): 64-77.
Maguire, Roberta S. “From the Blues to Jazz: Lewis Nordan’s Fiction as ‘Equipment for Living.” 41.3 (2003): 7-19.
Rudnicki, Robert W. “‘I Think I’m Beginning to See’: The Rustle of Lewis Nordan’s Fiction.” 41.3 (2003): 50-63.
Southern Review
Justus, James H. “Enduring Modernisms: Stark Young and the Nashville Agrarians.” 39.2 (2003): 418-36.
Folks, Jeffrey J. “Telos and Existence: Ethics in C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy and Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Everything
28-40.
Newsletter, and we thank all those who have contributed
Tell your story. In an essay of up to ords, write about how you first
that Rises Must Converge.’” 35.2 (2003): 107-18.
became interested in Southern literature. What Southern
Ford, Sarah. “Humor’s Role in Imagining America: Ebenezer
Newsletters? If so, let us hear from you!
Manning, Carol S. “The Comings of Cousin Ann:
Southern literature changed over time?
author or work first excited, troubled, or otherwise engaged you?
Cook’s ‘The Sot-Weed Factor.’” 35.2 (2003): 1-12.
How has your reading, teaching, writing, or understanding of
Deconstructing the Southern Romance.” 35.2 (2003): We welcome your ideas and suggestions for the
Please send responses by email to [email protected] by March 15,
topastissues. Whatwouldyouliketoseeinfutureissues? 2003. Be sure to include your name,Wtietlear,eaensdpeucniaivllyerisnitteyreasftefidliiantiaortnic.les, essays, book
Marquis, Margaret. “‘When de Notion Strikes Me’: Body Image, Food, and Desire in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” 35.2 (2003): 79-88.
Railton, Ben. “‘What Else Could a Southern Gentleman Do?’: Quentin Compson, Rhett Butler, and Miscegenation.” 35.2 (2003): 41-63.
reviews—any piece of writing you’d like to submit for consideration. Just drop us a line at the University of Arkansas, Kimpel Hall 333, Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701, or email us at [email protected].
MEMBERS IN THE SPOTLIGHT
The North Carolina Literary Review, edited by SSSL member Margaret Bauer, at East Carolina University, recently published its 2003 issue, featuring Aviation in North Carolina and Letters in commeration of the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight. The special feature section of the issue includes an interview with Clyde Edgerton, author of such books as The Floatplane Notebooks and In Memory of Junior, which are influenced by Edgerton’s lifelong love of flying and his experience as a pilot in the Vietnam War. SSSL Member Tim Edwards of the University of the Ozarks published an article on these two Edgerton novels in the special feature section as well.
SSSL Member Charlotte Beck, Professor Emerita of Maryville College, Tennessee, received the 2001 SSSL’s C. Hugh Holman Award for literary scholarship for her book The Fugitive Legacy: A Critical History (LSU Press, 2001). The award was presented at the SSSL MLA session in December 2002. Congratulations! Additionally, Dr. Beck will chair a session at the 2004 SSSL Conference on “God” in Robert Penn Warren’s poetry and fiction.
Michael P. Bibler of Tulane University has recently published a chapter entitled “‘As If Set Free Into Another Land’: Homosexuality, Rebellion, and Community in William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner” in the edited collection, Perversion and the Social Relation, edited by Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster, and Slavoj Zizek (Duke University Press).
SSSL Member Linda Byrd-Cook has recently published pieces on Lee Smith’s fiction. “Reconciliation with the Great Mother Goddess in Lee Smith’s Saving Grace” was published in the Summer 2002 issue (40.4) of The Southern Quarterly. Byrd-Cook also published the entry on “Lee Smith” in Literary Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Clark and published in 2002; the online encyclopedic entry may be found at: http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4119.
Professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College, Dr. Rosemary D. Cox, has recently published the chapter entitled “The Old Southwest: Humor, Tall Tales, and the Grotesque” in A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America, edited by Charles L. Crow and published by Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
Recently, during the American Literature Association convention in Cambridge, Massachussets, SSSL Member Ben Fisher participated in a panel on the teaching of Poe; Fisher’s topic was “Teaching the Graduate Seminar in Poe Studies.”
Jeffrey J. Folks teaches courses in Southern literature, including graduate courses on Poe and Faulkner, at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. Recently, he has published a number of books and articles on Southern literature, including: In a Time of Disorder: Form and Meaning in Southern Fiction from Poe to Oconnor, New York: Peter Lang, 2003; From Richard Wright to Toni Morrison: Ethics in Modern and Postmodern American Narrative, New York: Peter Lang, 2001; “‘Memory believes before knowing remembers’: Faulkner, Canetti, and Survival,” PLL: Papers on Language and Literature 39.3 (2003): 1-14; “Telos and Existence: Ethics in C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy and Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge,” Southern Literary Journal 34 (Spring 2003): 107-118; And, “Crowd and Self: William Faulkner’s Sources of Agency in The Sound and the Fury,” Southern Literary Journal 34 (Spring 2002): 835-840. Along with Nancy Summers Folks, he has also edited a special section on Richard Marius in the summer, 2003, issue of Southern Quarterly.
SSSL Member Marshall Bruce Gentry, formerly Chair of the English Department at the University of Indianapolis, is now Professor of English at Georgia College & State University. Gentry is also the Editor of the Flannery O’Connor Review.
Ed Piacento, Professor of English at High Point University and current Vice-President of SSSL, recently chaired a session on Southern Humor at SAMLA in Atlanta on November 14, 2003.
Kenneth Robbins, author of City of Churches, In the Shelter of the Fold, Buttermilk Bottoms, and The Baptism of Howie Cobb, has recently co-edited a new collection of stories entitled Christmas Stories from Louisiana, University Press of Mississippi, Fall, 2003. The collection is one of a series managed by the Press aimed at celebrating the special qualities of Christmas and the holiday season in the South, and includes illustrations by Lafayetteville, LA artist, Francis X. Pavvy, and stories by Robert Olen Butler, Katherine Anne Porter, Lyle Saxon, Solomon Northrup, Genaro Ky Ly Smith, Kelly Cherry, Sheryl St. Germain, and many others.
NOMINEES FOR THE SSSL EXECUTIVE COUNCIL
All members will receive a ballot through regular mail for the SSSL Executive Council election. You should cast your vote by checking four names on that ballot and returning the ballot (along with membership renewal information and fees) to: Jeff Abernathy, Vice President for Academic Affairs, West Virginia Wesleyan College, 59 College Ave., Buckhannon, WV, 26201 by January 20, 2004.
______ Robert Donahoo is Associate Professor of English at Sam Houston State University and currently editor of Cheers!, the newsletter of the Flannery O’Connor Society. He has published a number of articles on Flannery O’Connor in scholarly journals and has contributed essays on American postmodern science in collections from U of Georgia Press and from Twayne. He has forthcoming essays on O’Connor in an essay collection from Peter Lang and on Horton Foote in the Journal of the American Studies Association. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies in his department and as book review editor of Texas Review.
______ Susan V. Donaldson is NEH Professor of English at the College of William and Mary where she has taught since 1985. She is the author of Competing Voices: The American Novel, 1865-1914 (1998), which won the Choice Award in 1999, co-editor with Anne Goodwyn Jones of Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, and guest editor of two Faulkner Journal special double issues on sexuality (1993/94) and masculinity (1999/2000), as well as co-editor of the forthcoming special issue on “Faulkner, Memory, and History” (2004). She has also published over thirty essays on Southern literature, culture, and art. She has taught courses in Southern literature at the University of Bonn as a senior Fulbright Lecturer.
______ Minrose Gwin is Professor of English at Purdue University where she teaches courses such as Southern Literature, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison, and Creative Nonfiction Prose. She is author of Wishing for Snow: A Memoir (forthcoming in January, 2004, LSU Press); The Woman in the Red Dress: Gender, Space, and Reading (U Illinois P); The Feminine in Faulkner and Black and White Women of the Old South (both from U Tennessee P). She is a co-editor of The Literature of the American South (Norton) and editor of A Woman’s Civil War Diary by Cornelia McDonald (U of Wisconsin P).
______ Pearl E. McHaney is Assistant Professor of English at Georgia State University. She is editor of The Eudora Welty Newsletter, 1997-present. She is editor of Eudora Welty: Writers’ Reflections upon Reading Her Work (1999, Hill Street Press); with Nash Burger, The Road to West 43rd Street: A Memoir (1995, UP of Mississippi); and A Writer’s Eye: Collected Book Reviews by Eudora Welty (1994, UP of Mississippi). She has co- edited a special issue of South Atlantic Review on “The Worldwide Face of Southern Literature.” She has published numerous articles on Eudora Welty in scholarly journals, and she has edited a forthcoming book, Eudora Welty: Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge UP, 2004).
______James H. Watkins is Associate Professor of English at Berry College where he teaches Southern literature and autobiography studies and where he co-directed the 2003 Southern Women Writers Conference. He edited Southern Selves: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing (Vintage, 1998), and his work has appeared in The Southern Quarterly, The North Carolina Literary Review, The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature, the History of Southern Womens’ Literature, and The Companion to Southern Literature. He is currently working on a book-length study of white masculinity and Southern identity in twentieth century autobiography and memoir.
______Emily Wright is Associate Professor of English at Methodist College where she directs the Southern Writers Symposium. She has published essays in The History of Southern Women’s Literature, The Companion to Southern Literature, and Southern Quarterly. She was one of the creators Southern Women Writers Conference at Berry College which she co-directed from 1994-2000.
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To Become a Member Or Renew Membership:
Print off and fill out this page, include a check for $10 made out to the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, and send your request to Jeff Abernathy, Vice President forAcademic Affairs, West Virginia Wesleyan College, 59 College Ave., Buckhannon, West Virginia 26201.
Name: ________________________________ Affiliation: _______________________________ Email: __________________________
Mailing Address: ______________________________________________________
______________________________________________________ Amount Enclosed: __________
For Inclusion in the Upcoming SSSL Newsletter:
Please submit responses to the following questionnaire to:
Dr. Robert Brinkmeyer, SSSLN Editor Department of English, University of Arkansas 333 Kimpel Hall, Fayetteville, AR 72701
Or E-mail to: [[email protected]]
DEADLINE FOR SPRING 2003 ISSUE: March 15, 2004
Please include your name and affiliation. Submit information in any of the following categories. Please use a separate sheet.
- 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.
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Time to Renew Your Membership?
In order to remain current and continue supporting the SSSL, please fill out and return the ballot that will be mailed to you. Also, be sure to include your membership information and dues.
Moving?
Please send your new address to
Jeff Abernathy, vice-president for Academic Affairs, West Virginia Wesleyan College, 59 College Avenue, Buckhannon, West Virginia 26201.
email: [email protected]
Department of English, University of Arkansas Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Editor
Society for the Study of Southern Literature Newsletter Kimpel Hall 333
Fayetteville, AR 72701