From the Editor:
This is quite some issue – thank-you so much to all of you who have contributed, especially to Jon Smith, who has written a fascinating account of his experiences in teaching southern studies out of the South, and across the border, in Canada. I read Jon’s observations with particular interest: I am teaching a southern literature course next semester for the first time here at the University of Sydney. I expect to encounter similar challenges and also,
I am sure, to enjoy some pleasant surprises.
Please note the 2010 SSSL Conference Call for Papers on p. 8.
Finally, a warm welcome to John Lowe, the new SSSL President, Katie McKee, the new Treasurer, and the other new members of the Executive Council: Eric Gary Anderson, Melanie Benson, Keith Cartwright and Barbara Ewell. (Barbara is of course one of the organisers of the 2010 New Orleans get-together). We look forward to working closely with you all over the next few years.
Kate and I wish you all a restful summer break, as we move into winter down south.
All the best,
Sarah Gleeson-White
A Message from the SSSL President
Greetings from Louisiana, where the big news this Spring is that Barbara Ewell (Loyola), Rebecca Mark and Nghana Lewis (Tulane) have nailed down the final plans for our 2010 conference in New Orleans. As the call for papers announces, they’ve secured a handsome new hotel hear the French Quarter for the meeting, and graduate students will find affordable housing in a second hotel nearby. The LSU English department will be helping out along the way, as will colleagues at Southern University, the University of New Orleans, and Xavier University, to make sure that all of you “pass a good time.” I was in the city for Jazz Fest last weekend and it was thrilling to see all the signs of renewal and hope that have blossomed this spring. We Louisianans are grateful to SSSL for selecting The Big Easy for this meeting; your support will vitally assist the ongoing renaissance of one of our nation’s greatest urban treasures.
Even closer to home, LSU’s program in Louisiana and Caribbean Studies just concluded its second conference of 2009, “Humboldt’s Transatlantic Personae: Plotting the Imaginaries,” a 150th anniversary homage to Alexander von Humboldt. The invited speakers addressed Humboldt’s contributions to geography, literature, history, linguistics, botany, zoology, astronomy, and much more. Professor Vera Kutzinski, Director of Vanderbilt’s Center for the Americas, presented an engrossing keynote address stemming from her ongoing new translation of several of the master’s key works. In March, our Program’s first 2009 conference addressed “Latino Cultures of Louisiana and the Caribbean” with the help of an international cast of scholars. I mention both these events not to publicize our program (well, maybe a little of that!) but to offer a couple of examples of how the transnational turn has affected Southern Studies.
We had ample evidence of that at our Williamsburg Conference last year, and I want to take this opportunity to commend our past President, Susan Donaldson (William and Mary) for her brilliant orchestration of a superb meeting, and also for her dedicated and inspiring leadership over the past two years. Grazie tante, Susanna!
On another front, I recently spoke at the dazzling Eudora Welty Centennial Conference put on by the Welty Society in the author’s native city of Jackson, Mississippi. The gathering attracted most of the best-known Welty scholars from the U.S. and abroad, and examined virtually every aspect of the life and works of Mississippi’s Native Daughter. Planned and organized by SSSL members Harriet Pollack (Bucknell University), Pearl McHaney (Georgia State University), and Suzanne Marrs (Millsaps College), the sessions were complemented by tours of Welty’s home and gardens, a staged presentation of the play based on her novella The Ponder Heart, an exhibit of some of her photographs at the Jackson museum, and a scintillating performance of her favorite orchestral pieces by the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra. Her 100th birthday was toasted by every individual present at the concluding luncheon. The conference, following the centennial celebration mounted by this year’s Natchez Literary Festival, underlined the central contribution of Welty’s glorious work to Southern, national, and world culture.
While attending the MLA Convention in San Francisco in December, I was honored to present the C. Hugh Holman Award for the most distinguished book published in Southern Studies in 2007 to Gary Ciuba (Kent State) for his Desire, Violence and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction. Many thanks to the selection committee – Edwin Arnold (Appalachian State, Julia Eichelberger (College of Charleston), and Sarah Gardner (Independent Scholar) – for their dedicated reading of the nominated volumes. I am pleased to announce that Keith Byerman
(Indiana State), Keith Cartwright (North Florida) and Ann Romines (George Washington University) have graciously agreed to serve as readers for this year’s Holman Committee. While we have solicited nominations from key University Presses, we urge members who wish to have works considered (by themselves or others) to contact relevant presses for nominations/submissions. .
SSSL prides itself on presenting timely and provocative panels at MLA, ALA, and other venues. We are all indebted to Barbara Ladd (Emory University) for the stellar planning she did for many of our panels at these conferences. Her capable replacement is Anthony Wilson (LaGrange College), who is busy plotting new sessions for 2010 and 2011 conferences.
Very shortly many of you will enjoy the intriguing panels Tara Powell (University of South Carolina) assembled for this year’s ALA meeting in Boston:
“Southern Poetry and the Narrative Impulse” will feature
1. “From the Civil War to Sears: Fred Chappell, Mohja Kahf and the Narrative of Home,” by Bill Hardwig, University of Tennessee
2. “George Scarbrough’s Poetry of Narrative Catharsis,” Mark A. Roberts, Virginia Intermont College
3. “Ekphrasis and Narrative in the Poetry of the Contemporary U.S. South,” Daniel Cross Turner, Siena College
A second session, devoted to “Southern Literature and the Environment” will consist of the following papers:
- “Lynching as Environmental Pollution in Angelina Weld Grimké’s ‘Blackness’,” Sandy Alexandre, Massachussetts Institute of Technology
- “Growing out of the Land: Southern Black Poets on Nature,” Camille T. Dungy, San Francisco State University
- “All in the Family: Incest and the Anti-Pastoral in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark,” Cameron ElizabethWilliams, Florida State University
Finally, most of us are going to experience some rough sailing in the year ahead, as the financial crisis upends college and university budgets. Good luck to all of you as you navigate the swells, and plan on joining the rest of us in the snug harbor of New Orleans in April to welcome in what we hope will be a renewed economy and academy, in the city that care forgot.As you all no doubt aware the Global Financial Crisis and many national recessions are likely to hit us all hard. We have become aware of two important resources that are facing some serious difficulties at the moment. LSU Press is facing significant cuts that may lead to its closure. Below is a message submitted by Leigh Anne Duck to H-Southern-Lit, alerting us to the problems in Baton Rouge and asking for our support. Not without some irony H-Net itself alerted us all to its financial difficulties by announcing a fund-raising drive this week. Details about ways we can help are below.
Notes From The Field
ON TEACHING SOUTHERN STUDIES (AND SOME SOUTHERN NOVELS) IN CANADA
Jon Smith, Simon Fraser University.
After twelve years of teaching in the Deep South (interrupted by a lovely Fulbright semester teaching in Germany), I have now finished my first academic year at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last fall, I taught a New Southern Studies seminar to six very smart Canadian graduate students; this spring,
I taught my first very large lecture course (Intro to Fiction, whose reading list included Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle and the three short novels of Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider) and a senior seminar in 20th-century U.S. Modernist fiction, subtitled “Region, Nation, Hemisphere” and featuring novels by Cather,
Dos Passos, and Faulkner. I had taught courses similar to the graduate seminar twice before at the University
of Montevallo, outside Birmingham, Alabama—once as a grad seminar, once as an honors undergrad one. The chief difference between the SFU and Montevallo experiences has been that, while Canadian students know much more about the U.S. than U.S. students know about Canada, and follow our elections extremely closely, even
the brightest still don’t know all that much. So sometimes I’d find myself answering such questions as “What’s
a carpetbagger?” and “What was the New Deal?” and “Thomas Jefferson—was he the one with the kite and the key?”—the first two from grad students, the third from a very bright undergraduate. (I’m not sure what to make of another question I got a lot of from the grad students: “Why are you teaching so much Ted Ownby?”) It’s an obvious point, but an important one for “hemispheric studies” or “North American studies”: students three miles apart in Blaine, Washington, and White Rock, British Columbia, get taught very different versions of North American history.
Beyond that simple observation, however, things get more complicated. By choice, I have never taught a “Southern literature” or “Southern culture” course, because I’ve never been able to figure out how to teach such a course without begging the question, without becoming mired in some very questionable hermeneutic circles. (New Southern Studies, as I teach it, is not about “the South” except as a concept: it’s basically an introduction to the last decade of critical conversations dealing with said “South.”) Partly as a result, I’ve never had to teach the sort of students who often self-select for such courses, but I hear about them from colleagues: predominantly white, Southern, conservative, and upper middle class, they’re often the sort that doesn’t understand why the Confederate battle flag can’t get waved at Ole Miss games. At Montevallo—a wonderful public liberal arts college, which has no football team and puts on competing musicals for Homecoming—I just didn’t get this sort of student, who was far more likely to get siphoned off to Alabama or Auburn. Montevallo is harder to get into than either of those, but many of my students were nevertheless from the first generation of their family to attend college. Nearly all were from in state, but very few identified conspicuously as “Southern” in that way.
My Canadian students didn’t bring much in the way of nationalism/regionalism either, though things might have been different had I been teaching in Quebec rather than British Columbia. I had thought Canada and the white South might share a certain anti-Yankee sensibility, but the Canadians I taught didn’t tend to construct their identities in strong opposition to any particular Other, not even Americans (who nevertheless do tend to get figured sometimes as boorish and insufficiently committed to the common good, chasing instead a suspect
individualism). Canada is still a relatively new country—indeed, still not entirely independent from Britain—and Canadian identity is something people are still working out. There’s a lot more guilt about indigenous peoples and a lot more talk of multiculturalism. I’ll hear six different languages in five minutes walking down the street in downtown Vancouver, four in the hallways of my office building at SFU. Of my students, forty percent’s first language is not English. (That figure encompasses quite a spectrum: some have been in BC two or three years and are not really proficient in English, but many others have been here since early childhood and write Standard English better than the “native” products of the atrocious school systems of the deep South.) What any of this exactly means when the rubber hits the road isn’t very clear to anyone. There’s also an East/West split of sorts,
so that in terms of laid-backness, some say Vancouver is roughly to Toronto what L.A. is to New York. However, it might be more accurate to say—commonsensically if also “postnationally”—that Vancouver is much more like Seattle than either is like Toronto or, say, Birmingham. Finally, I should probably note that you can’t find
an academic book about Vancouver that doesn’t mention “sense of place” somewhere: the city’s setting between mountains and sea is simply spectacular, and everybody knows it.
Yet all of this worked well for the grad seminar. I’m interested in southern studies as a case study in identity formation, and I’m also interested in how a discipline moves from being a “taker” of other fields’ ideas— borrowing French feminism to talk about Eudora Welty, say, or Benedict Anderson to talk about southern identity—to a “donor” discipline that might affect the course of American studies, postcolonial theory, modernist studies, African American studies, and so on—an interest that I hope might help graduate students sort out what separates a more compelling or marketable dissertation from ones that are less so. The fact that my Canadian students didn’t know much about the South also meant they didn’t bring a lot of fantasies about it—and I mean “fantasy” here in the strict Lacanian sense. As a result, they had as sharp an eye as anyone for the identitarian fantasies southernists and southerners (and, goodness knows, many Europeans, as Helen Taylor and others have reminded us) did and often still do bring to the table. It was trickier sometimes to teach the undergraduates. British Columbia license plates now read “The Best Place on Earth” (though most citizens of the province believe the slogan displays an embarrassing and most un-Canadian immodesty), so it was tough for me to get across, say, Nordan’s complex mix of acknowledging Mississippi’s badness while defending it against northern journalists’ stereotypes, all the while struggling not to descend into false claims of moral equivalence. However, to characterize their difficulty as resulting from a lack on my students’ part—i.e., a lack of “memory” or a sense of “the presence of the past”—is, as I argue elsewhere, badly to miss the point.
One example to close: the first day of the graduate seminar, I brought in a warm six-pack of Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan ale (“The Original Pecan Nut Brown Ale”) and asked the students to analyze how it was being marketed. With only a little nudging, they hit the usual southern high marks, noting the connotations of lazy, magnolia, southern, the brewery’s siting on the “Jourdan River” in the tiny, tiny town of Kiln, Mississippi, the attempts to tie it to the whiskey for which the South is more famous (it’s brewed in “a region [of Mississippi] long famous for having the best water for bootleg whiskey”). But one student, Marc Acherman, also went on to notice the brewery’s global positioning: its website printed on the bottle, how it won a Bronze Award at the 2006 “World Beer Cup,” how the beer itself was an “English-style nut brown ale.” What the class quickly did from there was to arrive independently at a theory of what Jim Peacock calls “grounded globalism”—at least, that’s what they claimed the marketing campaign was aiming at.
The class kept doing things like that all fall. I still don’t know to what degree that was because SFU is a very good university, or because students were “outside” the ideologies and fantasies that lead so many to make such weird claims about “the South,” or just because—most humblingly—the ideas one generation spills blood to get accepted are the natural starting point for people born a couple of decades later. Whatever the cause, I am learning this: Canada is a great place from which to study, if not “the South,” then at least southern studies.
SSSL LIAISON TO MLA
The SSSL Liaison to MLA for 2010 and 2011 will be Dr. Anthony Wilson of LaGrange College in Georgia. He is the author of Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture (Mississippi 2006), and he is chair of the department at LaGrange College in Georgia Dr Wilson can be contacted at: [email protected]
Dr Wilson will be circulating calls for papers in the summer for the 2010 convention.
THE MOST INFLUENTIAL SOUTHERN NOVEL
Recently Rob Schaller, the Director of Communications at South Carolina ETV, got in touch with us about an episode of Take on the South, which involved a discussion on just what the most influential southern novel might be. The debate was moderated by Walter Edgar, the director of the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina, and featured Trudier Harris and Noel Polk.
The debate also featured an online poll, and you can see the final results by clicking on the “Online Poll Results” tab on the website below. Perhaps not surprisingly Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell put in a good showing.
But, in order to maintain some suspense we will not reveal the number one Most Influential Southern Novel as determined by the viewers. We are, however, convinced few will be surprised.
To see the show and the results of the poll go to: http://www.scetv.org/index.php/take_on_the_south/show/great_ southern_novel
UPCOMING EVENTS, ANNOUNCEMENTS AND CALLS FOR PAPERS
EVENTS
Southern Writers/Southern Writing Offers
New Perspectives
The University of Mississippi English Department’s Fifteenth Annual Southern Writers/Southern Writing Graduate Conference, to be held July 17-18, 2009,
in Oxford, Mississippi, will feature over thirty-five critical and creative presentations by graduate students from across the nation and from five international universities. Such wonderful international participation demonstrates the strong presence of Southern Studies in graduate programs across the globe. In addition
to student presentations, the conference will feature
a discussion panel on “Teaching the New Southern Studies” with a remarkable group of professors: Dr. Scott Romine (UNC-Greensboro), Dr. Kate Cochran (University of Southern Mississippi), Dr. Kathryn McKee (University of Mississippi), and Dr. Leigh Anne Duck (University of Memphis). Dr. Romine, the author of The Narrative Forms of Southern Community and The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction, will offer a plenary lecture on Friday, July 17, (tentatively) entitled “When We Talk About the South, Are We Just Talking?,” an exploration of how the word “South” operates discursively in the New Southern Studies. For more information about Southern Writers/Southern Writing, please contact Tara McLellan at [email protected]
8th Biennial Southern Women Writers Conference
September 24-26, 2009 Berry College
Rome, Georgia
Our deadline for submission of proposals for scholarly and creative presentations has passed, but don’t let that stop you from attending the Southern Women Writers Conference this coming September. Our plenary speakers this year include Judith Ortiz Cofer, Allison Hedge Coke, Natalie Daise, Thulani Davis, Connie May Fowler, Melissa Fay Greene, Sarah
Gordon, Sharyn McCrumb, Marsha Norman, Mab Segrest and Natasha Trethewey.
Speakers’ bios are available at: http://www.berry.edu/ academics/humanities/english/swwc2009/bios.asp
Since its inception in 1994, the Southern Women Writers Conference has been devoted to showcasing the works
of well known and emerging southern women writers, expanding the literary canon, and developing critical and theoretical understandings of traditions and innovations in southern women’s writing.
The theme for the 2009 conference is “Many Souths: Remembering, Sustaining, Creating.” In recent decades, monolithic conceptions of the U.S. South have given way to more nuanced and particularized ways of understanding and representing the region and its inhabitants. Yet even
a cursory glance at the literary history of “the South” reveals writing marked from the very beginning by an awareness and appreciation of localized, subregional difference. Women writers have given us indelible images of regions within the region, from the mountain South to the Mississippi Delta, the Low Country to Cajun Country, and the continental-flavored coastal cities to the suburban Sunbelt. Coinciding with these geographical subregions, differences in gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexuality, and spirituality reveal additional “Souths” within “the South.” Plenary speakers and presenters in break-out sessions will explore the ways in which southern women have used the written word to evoke these and other Souths,whether through remembering, sustaining,
or creating.
For information on registration, plenary speakers, conference schedule, local hotel accommodations, our Emerging Writers Contest, and other details,
visit our website at www.berry.edu/swwc2009 Queries should be made via e-mail to:
ANNOUNCEMENTS
The Teaching Faulkner Newsletter
The Teaching Faulkner newsletter, published by the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri
State University, is seeking contributions for upcoming issues. The newsletter is meant as an aid to those who teach Faulkner’s work at all levels, and a variety of submissions will be considered, including: scholarly essays, pedagogical essays, course syllabi and/or class assignments with commentary, student-written essays, creative works inspired by or in response to Faulkner, and personal essays about experiences with Faulkner
in the classroom. Submissions of varying lengths will be considered for publication. To submit electronically or for more information about upcoming deadlines for upcoming issues, email the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University at [email protected]
CALLS FOR PAPERS
SSSL Conference 2010
Everybody Loves You When You’re Down And South: Cultural Capital in Hard Times April 8-11, 2010
Pere Marquette Hotel
New Orleans, Louisiana
In the southern United States “hard times” seems redundant: the South has always been the bad news region of the country. We are the site of violence, poverty, despair, bigotry, and floods of biblical proportions, which makes us something to see. So
we become a preferred destination: for tourists and carpetbaggers, entrepreneurs and retirees, historians and theorists, writers and readers. And hard times
turn into good times, at least for some. One powerful paradox of the South has been the ways that its deficiencies become its best asset. Hardship inspires the creativity necessary not just for the traditional activities of “making a chicken stretch,” “piecing a quilt”, or singing the blues, but also for using that fabled cultural capital to write poetry that travels the world or to get a post-Katrina gig as a Mardi Gras Indian in Paris.
But even if we have taken our hard-earned cultural capital and exported “America” across the globe in appealing
and profitable southern attire, if we’ve transformed the Bible Belt into the Sun Belt, producing BMW’s faster than Baptists, we never really seem to be able to shake that hard times handle. Why not? One reason is certainly that the nation needs us as a projection screen, making the hard times in the rest of the nation invisible. Something called “The South” remains the movie set for a host of familiar fears: about miscegenation, the loss of national identity, economic decline, shifting sexualities, environmental decay, and collapsing infrastructures. But as the rest of
the nation catches up, unable to deny being down and out both at home and abroad, the exceptional status of the South seems less exceptional. What can be learned from the ways that the South has been surviving, enduring,
and weathering or even overcoming, transforming, and reinventing hard times? Has the South always been
selling itself up river in order to survive? How has our co-dependent, perpetual otherness created cultural capital, capital culture, and the culture of capitalism for the nation and the world?
By taking our conversations down to the mouth of the Mississippi, to New Orleans, that paragon of southern cultural capital, we hope that we can take a harder look at how the persistent (or perceived) deficiencies of the South have become our primary currency–and thus continue our efforts to re-conceptualize southern status—not just down and out, but up and in, around and about.
Some of the topics we might want to address include:
- southern cultural capital and capitols
- economics and class disparities
- the cultures of poverty and violence
- migration and immigration in global hard times
- miscegenated space and cultural production
- ethnic identity as cultural capital
- Afro-Caribbean cultural interchanges
- Latino and Central American Souths
- climate change, hurricanes and weatheringhard times
- industrial cultures: oil, fishing, sugar cane, cotton,rice, indigo, chicken, Wal-Mart
- the economics of tourism
- Hollywood South
- tourist souths: Natchez, Nashville, Charleston,New Orleans
- global exchanges: southern music, food,culture, literature around the world
- sharecroppers and other silenced voices
- 1930’s documentary south
- the south as a retirement community
- the Golf South
- archeological souths
- post-Katrina New Orleans
- music as survival capital: blues, jazz, bluegrass
- selling Native cultures and casinosProgram committee members: John Lowe, Nghana Lewis, Katherine Henninger, Rebecca Mark, and Barbara Ewell. We welcome both session proposals and individual paper abstracts addressing the topics of southern cultural capital, cultural exchanges, and weathering hard times.Please send two-page session proposals and/or one page individual paper abstracts by November 15, 2009, to:2010 SSSL Conference [email protected]
North Carolina Literary Review
The North Carolina Literary Review is seeking submissions for our 2010 issue, featuring North Carolina Appalachian literature. We will consider critical articles, interviews, and original creative writing for the special feature section. Submission deadline: August 1, 2009. Submissions from SSSL members can be emailed to the editor,
Margaret Bauer, at [email protected] or mail to her attention at :
555 English, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858-4353.C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Re-imagining the U.S. South: Regional Spaces, Bodies, and Texts
We are soliciting abstracts for papers focused on some aspect of the nineteenth-century U.S. South for two panels at the upcoming conference “Imagining: A New Century,” sponsored by C19: The Society of Nineteenth- Century Americanists. The conference will be held May 20-23, 2010 at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania: http://outreach.psu.edu/programs/c19- americanists/papers.htmlOur panels will be organized under the title “Re-imagining the U.S. South: Regional Spaces, Bodies, and Texts.”
In recent years the study of the literature and culture of
the U.S. South has been reinvigorated by a wholesale reassessment of the region’s place in the world. Drawing on the methodological tools of comparative cultural history, postcolonial and globalization theories, and indigenous, transnational, and global south studies, the “New Southern Studies” has reimagined both its objects of study andits fields of inquiry. Unfortunately, this recent work has focused almost exclusively on the 20th and 21st centuries. We hold that such a presentist bias represents a missed opportunity to reimagine earlier U.S. Souths.
The aim of these panels is twofold: to help promote greater attention to the 19th century by those interested and working in southern studies, and to help promote broader dialogue about the South with other Americanists.
Papers may address any period of the 19th century, though we hope for a range of papers that cover topics from the early national, antebellum, and postbellum years. Papers might address any of the following concerns, among many others:
19th century transnationalism
US South-Caribbean connections Early southern sexualities
Native Americans and the South Indian Removal- Landscapes, Architecture, and Literature
- New Perspectives on slavery
- New Immigrants
- Print culture in the South
- Oral cultures in the South
- Race, Law, and Literature
- “High” vs. “low” literature and/or culturein the South
- Southern periodicals
- Southern theatre and/or performance
- Interracial relations and/or racial mixing
- African American leadership
- Reimagining southern women’s identitiesSubmit 300 word abstracts to Eric Gary Anderson [email protected] by 1 September 2009.Eric Gary Anderson, George Mason University Michael Bibler, University of Manchester
Coleman Hutchison, The University of Texas at Austin Sherita L. Johnson, University of Southern MississippiNortheast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) 2010 Panel: Rethinking the South: Psychoanalysis and U.S. Southern Literature
April 7-11, 2010Montreal, Quebec – Hilton Bonaventure Deadline: September 30, 2009
The U.S. South is a complicated site of cultural memory, for the region remains at once the site of the trauma of slavery and also the mythic location of a vast nostalgia industry. Yet contemporary southern studies is a field increasingly energized by efforts to resist
the association of the South with narratives of decline and nostalgia and to reconceptualize memory, history, place, and community in ways that do not schematize subjectivity and reify the past. How does historical memory shape contemporary southern identity? How has recent work in the fields of trauma studies and memory studies reinvigorated and challenged the
role of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory in southern studies?
Fifteen-minute presentations are invited that address any aspect of the relationship between psychoanalysis and U.S. Southern literature. Topics may include but are not limited to the following:
psychoanalysis and the politics of identity in the South
trauma, memory studies and southern literature
witnessing in psychoanalysis, politics, and southernliterature
community, citizenship and subjectivity in the U.S.South
punishment, reparation, and historical memory literary representations of war memorials andcommemoration
formations of guilt in politics, literature, andpsychoanalysis
psychoanalysis and gender identity
“primal scenes” of whiteness in southern literature trauma, memory, and oral traditions
culturally specific modes of understanding andresponding to trauma
trauma and psychoanalysis as theories of culture the relationship of trauma to the culture of moderncapitalism
ritual and spiritual responses to trauma
trauma in native/indigenous/aboriginal literatures southern culture and the unconscious
narrative fetishism
false memories and historical revisionism
nostalgia / nostalgia industriesPlease send a 1-2 page proposal and a brief c.v. to Lisa Hinrichsen [email protected] by September 30, 2009.
Please include with your abstract: Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal addressTelephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee)The 41st Annual Convention will feature approximately 350 sessions, as well as dynamic speakers and cultural events. Details and the complete Call for Papers for the 2010 Convention will be posted in June: www.nemla.org
Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.
Faulkner and Morrison
A Conference Sponsored by the Center for Faulkner Studies
Southeast Missouri State University Cape Girardeau, Missouri
October 28-30, 2010This “Faulkner and Morrison” conference invites proposals for twenty-minute papers on any topic related to William Faulkner and/or Toni Morrison. All critical approaches, including theoretical and pedagogical, are welcomed. We are particularly interested in inter-textual approaches and papers treating such topics as race, gender, class, history, humor, and technique. Proposals for organized panels are also encouraged.
In addition to the paper sessions, the conference will include a keynote address by a noted scholar, a dramatic presentation based on the works of Faulkner and Morrison, exhibits from the University’s Faulkner and Morrison collections, and a guided tour of the historical downtown Cape Girardeau and riverfront.Australia and New Zealand American
Studies Association
Please be advised that the Call for Papers for 2010 conference, to be held July 1-4th, in Adelaide, Australia, is on the Association website. The deadline for submission is 16 October, 2009.
Please mark your planners and start considering submission ideas.Tom Buchanan, University of Adelaide http://www.anzasa.arts.usyd.edu.au/conference/docs/ index.htm
SELECTED RECENT SCHOLARSHIP IN SOUTHERN LITERATURE
BOOKS
Arnold, Edwin T. What Virtue There Is in Fire: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009.
Bailey, D’Army. The Education of a Black Radical: A Southern Civil Rights Activist’s Journey, 1959-1964. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. [October]
Bibler, Michael. Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.
Boehm, Lisa Krissoff. Making a Way Out of No Way: African American Women and the Second Great Migration. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Rebecca Harding Davis’s Stories of the Civil War Era: Selected Writings from
the Borderlands. Ed. Sharon M. Harris and Robin L. Cadwallader. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. [February]Expanded versions of the papers will be considered for possible publication in a collection of essays. Southeast Missouri State University Press has expressed an interest in such a collection.
E-mail a 250-word abstract by May 31, 2010, to: [email protected]
Inquiries should be directed to Robert Hamblin at [email protected] or (573) 651-2628, or Christopher Rieger at [email protected] or (573) 651-2620.
Dungy, Camille T. Ed. Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American nature Poetry. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. [December]
Fisher, Ben. The Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Gillespie. Michelle K. and Randal L. Hall, eds.
Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. [August]
Koloski, Bernard, ed. Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. [December]
Millichap, Joseph. Robert Penn Warren after Audubon: The Work of Aging and the Quest for Transcendence in His Later Poetry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. [December ]
Olson, Ted. James Still in Interviews, Oral Histories and Memoirs. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2009.
Richards, Samuel Pearce. Sam Richards’s Civil War Diary: A Chronicle of the Athens Home Front. Ed. Wendy Hamand Venet. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. [June]
Rieger, Christopher. Clear-Cutting Eden: Ecology and the Pastoral in Southern Literature. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009.
Roberts-Miller, Patricia. Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009.
Scharnhors Gary, ed. Mainly the Truth: Interviews with Mark Twain. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009.
Sensibar, Judith. Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
Seltzer, Catherine. Elizabeth Spencer’s Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the South, and Southern Literary Production. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Spence, James R. Watering the Sahara: Recollections
of Paul Green from 1894 to 1937. Ed. Margaret Bauer. Raleigh: Office of Archives and History, a division of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 2008.Welty, Eudora. Occasions: Selected Writings. Ed. Pearl Amelia McHaney. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.
Wood, Marcus. The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010 [February]
BOOK CHAPTERS AND ARTICLES
Fisher, Ben. “Mourning and Eve(ning): Teaching Poe’s Poetry.” Approaches to Teaching Poe’s Prose and Poetry. Ed. Jeffrey Weinstock, Tony Magistrale. New York: MLA, 2008. 81-88.
Modern Fiction Studies
McWhirter, David. “Eudora Welty Goes to the Movies: Modernism, Regionalism, Global Media.” Special Issue: Regional Modernisms. Modern Fiction Studies 55.1 (2009): 68-91
American Literary History
Kreyling, Michael. “Robert Penn Warren: The Real Southerner and The ‘Hypothetical Negro’.” Am Lit Hist 21.2 (2009): 268-95.
American Literature
Evans, David H. “CUT!… Flannery O’Connor’s Apotemnophiliac Allegories.” American Literature 81.2 (2009): 305-31.
Lee, Maurice S. “Probably Poe.” American Literature 81.2 (2009): 225-52.
Doolen, Andy. ““Be Cautious of the Word ‘Rebel’: Race, Revolution, and Transnational History in Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America.” American Literature 81.1 (2009): 153-79.
Zieger, Susan. “Impostors of Freedom: Southern White Manhood, Hypodermic Morphine, and E. P. Roe’s Without a Home.” American Literature 80.3 (2008): 527-54.
Arizona Quarterly
Billitteri, Carla. “Stories, Not History: Laura Riding’s Progress of Truth.” Arizona Quarterly 65.1 (2009): 85-105.
Davis, Rynetta. “Performing Beauty: Allegories of Social Passing in Eliza Potter’s A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life.” Arizona Quarterly 65.1 (2009): 33-54.
Jerng, Mark C. “The Character of Race: Adoption and Individuation in William Faulkner’s Light in August and Charles Chesnutt’s The Quarry.” Arizona Quarterly 64.4 (2008): 69-102.
Lam, Bethany L. “Light in August in Light of Foucault: Reexamining the Biracial Experience.” Arizona Quarterly 64.4 (2008): 49-68.
Mississippi Quarterly
Eudora Welty Special Issue
Clarke, Deborah. “Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles: Cars and Family Values.” The Mississippi Quarterly (2009): 143-158.
Mark, Rebecca. “Carnival Geeks and Voudoun Healing: The Performance of White Guilt and African American Empowerment in Eudora Welty’s ‘Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden’.” The Mississippi Quarterly (2009): 13-34.
Marrs, Suzanne. “Eudora Welty: The Liberal Imagination and Mississippi Politics.” The Mississippi Quarterly (2009): 5-12.
McWhirter, David. “Fish Stories: Revising Masculine Ritual in Eudora Welty’s ‘The Wide Net’.” The Mississippi Quarterly (2009): 35-59.
Neckles, Christina. “Revaluative Reading and Literary Memory in Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter.” The Mississippi Quarterly (2009): 159-178.
Smith, Dina. “Cinematic Modernism and Eudora Welty’s the Golden Apples.” The Mississippi Quarterly (2009): 81-100.
South Carolina Review
Boyleston, Matthew. “Wild Boar In These Woods: The Influence Of Seamus Heaney On The Poetry Of Ron Rash.” South Carolina Review 41.2.
Southern Cultures
Thuesen, Sarah C. “‘Everything Changed, but Ain’t Nothing Changed’: Recovering a Generation of Southern Activists for Economic Justice.” Southern Cultures 14.3 (2008): 142-152.
Whitfield, Stephen I. “The ‘Golden’ Era of Civil Rights: Consequences of the Carolina Israelite.” Southern Cultures 14.3 (2008): 26-51.
Carson, James Taylor. “‘The Obituary of Nations’: Ethnic Cleansing, Memory, and the Origins of the Old South.” Southern Cultures 14.4 (2008): 6-31.
Oakley, Christopher Arris. “‘When Carolina Indians Went on the Warpath’: The Media, the Klan, and the Lumbees of North Carolina.” Southern Cultures 14.4 (2008): 55-84.
Osburn, Katherine M. B. “Mississippi Choctaws and Racial Politics.” Southern Cultures 14.4 (2008): 32-54.
Baker, Bruce E. “How W. E. B. Dubois Won the United Daughters of the Confederacy Essay Contest.” Southern Cultures 15.1 (2009): 69-81.
Loewen, James W. “Sundown Towns and Counties: Racial Exclusion in the South.” Southern Cultures 15.1 (2009): 22-47.
Lawton, Christopher R. “Constructing the Cause, Bridging the Divide: Lee’s Tomb at Washington’s College.” Southern Cultures 15.2 (2009): 5-39.
Southern Literary Journal
Bauer, Margaret D. “On Flags and Fraternities: Lessons on Cultural Memory and Historical Amnesia in Charles Chesnutt’s ‘Po’ Sandy’.” The Southern Literary Journal 40.2 (2008): 70-86.
Griffin, Larry J., and Peggy G. Hargis. “Surveying Memory: The Past in Black and White.” The Southern Literary Journal 40.2 (2008): 42-69.
Gwin, Minrose. “Introduction: Reading History, Memory, and Forgetting.” The Southern Literary Journal 40.2 (2008): 1-10.
Mark, Rebecca. “Mourning Emmett: ‘One Long Expansive Moment’.” The Southern Literary Journal 40.2 (2008): 121-137.
Metress, Christopher. “Making Civil Rights Harder: Literature, Memory, and the Black Freedom Struggle.” The Southern Literary Journal 40.2 (2008): 138-150.
Hershon, Larry. “Tension and Transcendence: ‘The Jew’ In the Fiction of Carson McCullers.” The Southern Literary Journal 41.1 (2008): 52-72.
Perreault, Jeanne. “Southern White Women’s Autobiographies: Social Equality and Social Change.” The Southern Literary Journal 41.1 (2008): 32-51.
Pickering, Edward D. “The Roots of New Criticism.” The Southern Literary Journal 41.1 (2008): 93-109.
Wilson, Matthew. “A History of Forgetting, and The ‘Awful Problem’ Of ‘Race’: A New Historical Note.” The Southern Literary Journal 41.1 (2008): 20-31.
Southern Spaces
“Poets in Place, Southern Spaces, Emory University.” Southern Spaces. May 2009. http://southernspaces.org/ contents/2009/poets/1a.htm
Crespino, Joseph. “The U.S. South and the 2008 Election.” Southern Spaces. Dec 2008. http://southernspaces.org/ contents/2008/crespino/1a.htm
Egerton, John. “Walking into History: The Beginning of School Desegregation in Nashville.” Southern Spaces. May 2009. http://southernspaces.org/contents/2009/egerton/1a. htm
Horton, James Oliver. “The Future of Slavery’s Historical Spaces.” Southern Spaces. Feb 2009. http://southernspaces. org/contents/2009/horton/1a.htm
White, Richard. “Corporations, Corruption, and the Modern Lobby: A Gilded Age Story of the West and the South in Washington, D.C.” Southern Spaces. April 2009. http://southernspaces.org/contents/2009/white/1a.htm
Southern Quarterly
Richard Wright Special Issue
Hogue, W. Lawrence. “Can the Subaltern Speak? A Postcolonial, Existential Reading of Richard Wright’s Native Son.” Southern Quarterly 46.2 (2009): 9-39.
Rambsy, Howard. “Re-presenting Black Boy: The Evolving Packaging History of Richard Wright’s Autobiography.” Southern Quarterly 46.2 (2009): 71-83.
Butler, Robert. “Seeking Salvation in a Naturalistic Universe: Richard Wright’s Use of His Southern Religious Background in Black Boy (American Hunger).” Southern Quarterly 46.2 (2009): 46-60.
Collins, Janelle. “Easing a Country’s Conscience: Little Rock’s Central High School in Film.” Southern Quarterly 46.1 (2008): 78-90.
Russell, David. “A Vision of Reunion: Kate Chopin’s At Fault.” Southern Quarterly 46.1 (2008): 8-25.
Funk, William H. “Glimpses of Seasons: A Pilgrimage to the Birthplace of Robert Penn Warren.” Southern Quarterly 46.1 (2008): 100-108.
Piacentino, Ed. “Reconciliation with Family in Alice Walker’s ‘Kindred Spirits’.” Southern Quarterly 46.1(2008): 91-99.
Studies in American Humor
Piacentino, Ed. “Recovering C. M. Haile, Antebellum Southern Humorist.” Studies in American Humor 3.16 (2007): 47-68.