A Message from the SSSL President
It will be hard for me to follow Bill Andrews as president of the SSSL. Bill did much to set our house in order. Our funds are safely invested, our bib- liography is back in full operation, our last general meeting in Chapel Hill succeeded admirably in just about any way one might want to measure it, our presence on the Web is clearly established, and we are once again inves- tigating major projects that offer to involve many of the SSSL’s members directly. The Society owes Bill its thanks for seeing to it that our business was not only tended, but tended with great care and genuine concern. One other thing for which I am especially grateful is that our bylaws stipulate that past presidents remain on the Executive Council.
I am also enormously grateful to those officers who continue to serve and to those who manage our year-to-year operations. Having been the secretary- treasurer and editor of the newsletter years ago when all those jobs were one job and the newsletter was mimeographed on yellow paper, I am person- ally very much aware of the value of the contributions Jeff Abernathy, Bob Brinkmeyer, and Mary Weaks-Baxter make to our collective well-being as an academic society. The job of president of the SSSL would not be very pleasant without them; indeed these days it wouldn’t be possible.
The prospects for the next two years, developing on the strengths of our re- cent past, look promising. Robert West has organized sessions for the MLA convention next December, and Gary Richards is our ALA coordinator. The SSSL sessions at SAMLA and SCMLA are not officially recognized in our bylaws, but George Hovis and others who are organizing programs under the SSSL rubric for these meetings are clearly promoting the SSSL’s inter- ests. Jon Smith and Riche Richardson are making arrangements and orga- nizing the program for our next SSSL meeting which will be in Birmingham in Spring 2006; they along with Scott Romine, constitute a Publications Committee charged with examining and recommending projects for the Society. The committee will no doubt welcome all the recommendations it receives.
The SSSL bibliography is once again in full operation on the Web under the guidance of Mary Weaks-Baxter and her com- mittee. The site has received well over two million hits since it went on-line a little over two years ago. Peter Scholing of the University of Groningen wrote the programs we are using, and he continues to monitor their operation and recommend changes. Gordon Garretson at Mississippi State has been the Webmaster for the bibliography since its inception. Gordon is leaving this spring; we owe him our thanks for his skills and dedication to the project.
We have four new members of the Executive Council– Martyn Bone, Deborah Cohn, Leigh Anne Duck, and Jennifer Greeson. I look forward to working with them and the other members of the Council to keep the momentum that Bill An- drews gave us.
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Martyn Bone
—-“The Transnational Turn in the South: Region, Nation, Globalization.” In Russell Duncan and Clara Juncker, eds., Transna tional America: Contours of Modern U.S. Culture. Copenhagen: Museum Tuscalanum Press, 2004. 217-235.
—-The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
—-“The Transnational Turn, Houston Baker’s New Southern Studies, and Patrick Neate’s Twelve Bar Blues.” Comparative American Studies vol. 3, no. 2 (June 2005): 189-211.
Course taught:
—-“The U.S. South in Contemporary Literature.” M. A. Course, University of Copenhagen.
Texts used: Percy, The Moviegoer; Walker, The Complete Stories; Douglas, Can’t Quit You, Baby; Hannah, Ray; Mason, In Country; Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain; Wolfe, A Man in Full; Brodber, Louisiana.
SELECTED RECENT SCHOLARSHIP IN SOUTHERN LITERATURE
The African American Review
Bryant, Cedric Gael. “The Soul has Bandaged Moments”: Reading the Gothic in Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home,” Morrison’s Beloved, and Gomez’s Gilda.” 39.4 (2005): 541-54.
Butler, Robert. “The Loeb and Leopold Case: A Neglected Source for Native Son.” 39.4 (2005): 555-68
Debo, Annette. “Reflecting Violence in the Warpland: Gwen- dolyn Brooks’s Riot.” 39.1-2 (2005): 143-52.
Ellison, Mary. “Echoes of Africa in To Sleep with Anger and Eve’s Bayou.” 39.1-2 (2005): 213-30.
Emery, Amy Fass. “The Zombie In/As the Text: Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse.” 39.3 (2005): 327-36.
Fulton, Lorie Watkins. “Hiding Fire and Brimstone in Lacy Groves: The Twinned Trees of Beloved.” 39.1-2 (2005): 189-200.
Gauthier, Marni. “The Other Side of Paradise: Toni Morri son’s (Un)Making of Mythic History.” 39.3 (2005): 395-414.
Hobson, Christopher Z. “Invisible Man and African American Radicalism in World War II.” 39.3 (2005): 355-76.
Hoffman-Jeep, Lynda. “Creating Ethnography: Zora Neale Hurston and Lydia Cabrera.” 39.3 (2005): 337-54.
James, Jennifer. ““Civil” War Wounds: William Wells Brown, Violence and the Domestic Narrative.” 39.1-2 (2005): 39-54.
Kang, Nancy. ““As if I had entered a Paradise”: Fugitive Slave Narratives and Cross-Border Literary History.” 39.3 (2005): 431-58.
Lamothe, Daphne. “Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day: Bridging Roots and Routes.” 39.1-2 (2005): 155-70.
Read, Andrew. ““As if word magic had anything to do with the courage it took to be a man”: Black Masculinity in Toni Morrison’s Paradise.” 39.4 (2005): 527-40.
Romero, Channette. “Creating the Beloved Community: Reli
gion, Race, and Nation in Toni Morrison’s Para- dise.” 39.3 (2005): 415-30.
Stephens, Judith L. “Art, Activism, and Uncompromising Att- itude in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Lynching Plays.” 39.1-2 (2005): 87-102.
Washington, Teresa N. “The Mother-Daughter Àjé Relation- ship in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” 39.1-2 (2005): 171-88.
Weathers, Glenda B. “Biblical Trees, Biblical Deliverance: Literary Landscapes of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison.” 39.1-2 (2005): 201-12.
Young, Hershini Bhana. “Inheriting the Criminalized Black Body: Race, Gender, and Slavery in Eva’s Man.” 39.3 (2005): 377-93.
American Literary History
Nancy Bentley. “The Strange Career of Love and Slavery: Chesnutt, Engels, Masoch.” 17.2 (2005): 460-85.
American Literature
Hopkins, Brooke. “John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights.” 78.1 (2006): 179-80.
“Private Perry and Mister Poe: The West Point Poems, 1831.” 78.1 (2006): 195-96.
“Perfect Companionship: Ellen Glasgow’s Selected Corre spondence with Women.” 78.1 (2006): 197.
“Mark Twain in Japan: The Cultural Reception of an Ameri- can Icon.” 78.1 (2006): 198.
American Quarterly
May, Robert E. “Reconsidering Antebellum U.S. Women’s History: Gender, Filibustering, and America’s Quest for Empire.” 57.4 (2005):
The Faulkner Journal
Atkinson, Ted. “The Ideology of Autonomy: Form and Func- tion in As I Lay Dying.” 21 (2005-2006): 15-27.
SELECTED RECENT SCHOLARSHIP IN SOUTHERN LITERATURE
Fenrick, Michael. ““With Judgment Reserved”: Reading Both Predictably and Unpredicatably in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and The Wild Palms .” 21 (2005-2006): 121-32.
Hagood, Taylor. “Media, Ideology, and the Role of Literature in Pylon.” 21 (2005-2006): 107-20.
Lackey, Michael. “The Ideological Function of the God-Con- cept in Faulkner’s Light in August.” 21 (2005-2006): 66-90.
Lester, Cheryl. “As They Lay Dying: Rural Depopulation and Social Dislocation as a Structure of Feeling.” 21 (2005-2006): 28-50.
Newhouse, Wade. ““Aghast and Uplifted”: William Faulkner and the Absence of History.” 21 (2005-2006): 145- 66.
Railey, Kevin. “Faulkner and Ideology: Reflections on Criti- cal Subjects.” 21 (2005-2006): 3-14.
Ramsey, Matthew D. ““All that glitters”: Reappraising “Golden Land”” 21 (2005-2006): 51-65.
Skinfill, Mauri. “The American Interior: Identity and Com- mercial Culture in Faulkner’s Late Novels.” 21 (2005-2006): 133-44.
Tower, Theresa M. “Beyond the Old Marshal: Patriotic Non- sense,” the Vernacular Cosmopolitan, and Faulkner’s Fiction of the Early 1940s. .” 21 (2005-2006): 90- 106.
The Southern Quarterly
Andrews, William L. “William Johnson’s Diary: The Text and the Man Behind It.” 43.1 (2005): 18- 34.
Armstrong, Julie Buckner. “New Directions in Lynching Studies.” 43.1 (2005): 140-48.
Berlin, Ira. “Southenr Free People of Color in the Age of Wil- liam Johnson.” 43.1 (2005): 9-17.
Bristol, Jr., Douglas W. “Regional Identity, Black Barbers, and the African American Tradition of Entrepeneur- ialism.” 43.1 (2005): 74-96.
Clark, William Bedford. “Robert Penn Warren’s Band of Angels at Fifty.” 43.1 (2005): 176-86.
Curry, Leonard P. Free Blacks in the Urban South: 1800- 1850.” 43.1 (2005): 35-51.
De Santis, Christopher C. “Pseudo-History Versus Social Critique: Faulkner’s Reconstruction.” 43.1 (2005): 9-27.
Elfenbein, Anna Shannon. “Living Lessons: The Evolving Racial Norm in the Novels of Ann Tyler.” 43.1 (2005): 63-79.
Graham-Bertolini, Alison. “Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and the Reckoning of Ideology.” 43.1 (2005): 49-62.
Hodges, John O. “William Alexander Percy’s Lanters: A Reply from a Mississippi Sharecropper’s Son.” 43.1 (2005): 28-48.
Inglis, Douglas G. “Searchig for Free People of Color in Colonial Natchez.” 43.1 (2005): 97-112.
Koger, Larry. “Black Masters: The Misunderstood Slaveown- ers.” 43.1 (2005): 52-73.
Kronemer, Alex, Barbash, Louis, and Wolfe, Michael. “Prince Among Slaves: A Documentary Film Project.” 43.1 (2005): 137-57.
Mills, Elizabeth Shown. “Isle of Canes and Issues of Con- science: Master-Slave Sexual Dynamics and Slave holding by Free People of Color.” 43.1 (2005): 158- 75.
Sullivan, Lester. “A History of the William T. Johnson and Family Memorial Papers.” 43.1 (2005): 113-36.
The Southern Review
Doris, David T. “Traditional Somethings”: The Persistence of Áálé in Nigeria.” 42.1 (2006): 95-125.
Martone, Michael. “The Permanent Temporary.” 41.4 (2005): 878-85.
Rogoff, Jay. “The Touchstone.” 41.3 (2005): 628-49.
NOMINATIONS FOR EXECUTIVE COUNCIL OF SSSL
Nominating Committee: Katie McKee, University of Mis- sissippi; Dawn Truard, University of Central Florida; David Kesterson, University of North Texas (Chair)
Sharon Monteith
Sharon Monteith is Professor of American Studies in the School of American Studies and the Institute of Film Studies at the University of Nottingham in the UK. She is the author of Advancing Sisterhood? Interracial Friendships in Con- temporary Southern Fiction (Univ. of Georgia Press, 2000) and co-editor (with Suzanne Jones) of South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture (LSU Press, 2002) and (with Peter Ling) Gender and the Civil Rights Movement (Garland, 1999 and Rutgers 2004). She has contributed essays on Southern fiction or film to a variety of collections including The Black- well Companion to the American South, ed. Richard Gray, Memory and Popular Film, ed. Paul Grainge, and The African American Freedom Struggle, ed. Brian Ward, and in 2001-02 was a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow (Race and Gender in the Mississippi Delta) at the University of Memphis. She was Modern Editor of the journal Critical Survey for a number of years and is currently a General Editor of Scope: International Journal of Film Studies and a member of the advisory board of the new journal edited by Al Lopez called The Global South. She is currently finishing a book on the American 1960s and writing a book called “The Civil Rights Movement in the Melodramatic Imagination.
Ed Piacentino
Ed Piacentino is a professor of English at High Point Univer- sity in North Carolina, where he teaches courses in American literature, African American literature, American humor, and the literature of the American South. He has published widely in southern literature and culture of the nineteenth and twen- tieth centuries and has contributed essays and reviews to such journals as the Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Literary Jour- nal, Southern Quarterly, Southern Studies, Studies in Ameri- can Humor, American Literature, and Studies in Short Fiction. Also, he has authored and edited several books in southern literature, including T. S. Stribling: Pioneer Realist in Modern Southern Literature (University Press of America, 1988), The Humor of the Old South (University Press of Kentucky, 2001, and edited with M. Thomas Inge), and The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor, which will be published by Louisi-
ana State University Press in January of 2006. IN addition, he serves on the bibliography committee of SSSL and is currently editing the humorous dialect letters of Christopher Mason Haile, most of which originally appeared between 1840 and 1848 in the New Orleans Daily and Weekly Picayune under the pseudonym of Pardon Jones.
Riche’ Richardson
Riche’ Richardson is originally from Montgomery, Alabama, teach in the department of English at the University of Cali- fornia, Davis, and serve as co-editor of the series, “The New Southern Studies” at the University of Georgia Press. Her publications have appeared in journals such as American Lit- erature, the Mississippi Quarterly, and the Forum for Modern Language Studies. Her book, “Black Masculinity and the U. S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta,” is scheduled for pub- lication at the University of Georgia Press in 2006.
Judith Sensibar
[Ms. Sensibar requests that we use her bio from the last elec- tion, which should be on file with the secretary treasurer and editor of the newsletter.]
Annette Trefzer
Annette Trefzer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi where she teaches American litera- ture and literary theory. After finishing her book Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction (University of Alabama Press, 2006), she is now co-editing with Kathryn McKee a special issue of American Literature entitled “Global Contexts, Local Literature: The New Southern Studies.” She will be co-hosting a joint meeting of the Southern American Studies Association in conjunction with Adam Gussow of
the Living Blues Symposium in February 2007 at the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi.
Do you have ideas for future Newsletters? If so, let us hear from you!
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Jeff Abernathy, Dean of the College, Professor of English, Augustana College, 639 38th Street,
Rock Island, Illinois 61201.
Or email: [email protected]
Putting Membership Fees to Good Use
Some members have asked why they should support the SSSL through dues now that the newsletter is available online for free.
Former SSSL President, Bill Andrews, provides the following rationale:
* Registration fees for our conferences are kept low to encourage graduate student attendance, and we use dues to cover conference expenses that the fees don’t cover.
* Dues paying members can register for the biennial conference at a reduced rate, which non-members do not get when they register.
* The Newsletter still has expenses: we pay a webmaster for his work. The Newsletter also has a graduate student editorial assistant at the U of Arkansas who has to be compensated for her work.
* The work of the Bibliography Committee also requires technical support which in the past a single person (now retired) used to do for the Society at no cost. The labor required to input, download, and collate all the information the Bibliography Committee compiles in the future will require financial compensation.
* The work of the Society, though it has no paid staff, requires occasional technical and/or secretarial labor that must be compensated, e.g., the audit of the Society’s financial records that we have hired a student to do.
To Become a Member Or Renew Membership:
Print off this form and fill out the following information. Mail this form, with a check for $10 made out to the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, to Jeff Abernathy, Dean of the College, Professor of English, Augustana College, 639 38th Street, Rock Island, Illinois, 61201.
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For Inclusion in the Upcoming SSSL Newsletter:
Please mail submissions 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 FALL 2006 ISSUE: November 15, 2006
Please include your name and affiliation. Submit information in any of the following categories.
- News items from SSSL president, officers, panel organizers
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- Teaching Southern literature—special notices
- Requests for information
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- Other items of interest to SSSL membersIf you are organizing a panel for upcoming conferences/symposia, please provide complete information.