American Southern Literature

• general literary revival in the South since WWI
• first wave of Southern renaissance: Faulkner, T.Wolfe, J.C.Ransom, A.Tate, R.P.Warren, K.A.Porter, L.Hellman, E.Caldwell, Cleanth Brooks
• early 1940s & 1950s new generation “in search of love”: E.Welty, F.O’Connor, T.Williams, Truman Capote
• Southern writer = writer who was born and has lived his formative years within the Southern area, and who therefore displays in his works ‘southern temper’
• William Styron – may also be classified as southern, novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Confessions of Nat Turner
• Dorothy Allison – southern lesbian and feminist writer
• How do we account for the occurence of southern renaissance? Allen Tate explains it in terms of perfect literary situation: literature probes the deficiencies of a tradition, which is possible when a relatively homogenous society is breaking up (like in the 1920s)
• In early 1920s in Nashville, Tennessee, a small group of teachers and students at Vanderbilt University  began meeting weekly to discuss the poems they were writing and they published a magazine of verse The Fugitive, members: Tate, Ransom, Warren, created a consciously southern tradition, refused the sentimentalism of the local colour, took a critical view of commercialism, deplored the absence of firm ethical convictions and ruthless exploitation of nature and people, 1930 manifesto: I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners, program of direct return to traditional community values

Features of Southern culture and literature

►                         strong historical consciousness, closely connected to awareness of place

►                         agricultural tradition going back to plantation times

►                         existence of an oral story-telling tradition

►                         tense relationships between whites and blacks

►                         ubiquitous presence of black and southern dialects

►                         strange concepts of God and responsibility to family, home and region

►                         all-penetrating sense of the grotesque

• in the historical consciousness, the most important fact is the crushing defeat in the Civil War – thus the Southerner ceases to be classified as an American who is supposed not to know any defeat, thus Southern view of history is more pessimistic and in a way European, Southerner is an anomalous American
• special understanding of the notion of progress: history has proven that human beings do not change much and indeed they may be harmed by phenomena associated with „progress“, thus humans face the same moral difficulties no matter what the exigencies and achievements of the age
• slavery – for the older generations it was historical guilt, for the later generations the meaning of the very same notion is modified and becomes an abstract historical curse
• the generation in search of love is less obsessed with history and focuses mainly on intimate themes

William Faulkner

w                         history is a key factor for him, characters of southern ladies and gentlemen, new generation of materialistic rednecks

w                         1929 The Sound and the Fury (the Compson family), trilogy: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion (the Snopeses portrayed as cruel and narrow-minded)

w                         quite often the tragic family history is connected with race and also incest, e.g. Go Down Moses concerns the efforts of Ike McCaslin to cope with his grandfather’s siring of a child on his own mulatto daughter; the issue of race in Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August

w                         Faulkner not only breaks with traditional chronological structure insofar as most of his characters are rather past-oriented, but he also destroy the traditional linear development of a detective story in his predominantly Gothic novel Sanctuary and lets each of his heroes experience their own, i.e. subjective sense of time – objective mechanical time measured by clocks is gone and associated with this new philosophical concept are new narrative techniques: stream of consciousness, variation of points of view (the most challenging experiment was the attempt to enter the mind of the idiot Benjy in The Sound and the Fury)

w                         created a whole fictitious region Yoknapatawpha County with its capital Jefferson which is very much based on the Lafayette County and its capital Oxford

§      geography: the South is 11 states that formed the Confederacy, i.e. the states that voted for Hefferson Davis in 1861 , sometimes also Missouri and Kentucky

§      just one real city in the south: New Orleans – mixed architectural and cultural heritage, mainly French and Spanish, place of avant-garde writers, bohemians, homosexuals, criminals

§      Southern drawl – people talk very slowly and play mainly with the vowels, which are more sung than uttered (a common American prejudice is that the slow speech means slow thought), can be best enjoyed on stage or screen

§      Although Southerners are deeply religious, their faith is slightly modified: it has profoundly fatalistic undertones, the Bible is still an unshaken authority

§      families depicted by the generation in search of love are insufficient, either incomplete, or disintegrated and not functioning very well, or highly unconventional

§      rather than a responsibility towards family, the characters feel a responsibility to their communities – in a southern community everybody knows everybody and nobody is excluded, not even handicapped people, everybody is given his or her own space with its rather fixed duties

§      generally three types of humour: humour of a character, situational humour and purely linguistic humour (grotesque may be subdivided similarly): the grotesque quality of a character goes hand in hand with frequent occurrence of handicapped people, grotesque characters in general are called misfits, i.e. those who do not have a fixed place in society, and usually fail to find one; situational grotesque usually stems from the discrepancy between words and actions, between ideals and reality   (Flannery O’Connor master at this);

Robert Penn Warren

§      also chooses specific places in Southern geography and focuses on traditional Southern values: honour, responsibility and ethics could serve as a key to all his works

§      Night Rider – fight between factory owners and tobacco growers in Kentucky

§      At Heaven’s Gate – portrays a ruthless financier from Tennessee

§      All the King’s Men – masterpiece, Willie Stark is based on a real historical figure, the former governer of Louisiana who was an equally despotic political dictator as the fictitious „Boss“; narrator journalist Jack Burden

Flannery O’Connor

§      Most time at home in Georgia, Roman Catholic

§      Two novels: Wise Blood (1952), Violent Bear Away (1960)

§      Good Country People – how words mean different things for different people

§      A Good Man is Hard To Find – first collections of short stories

§      treated black characters as symbols, e.g. in Artificial Nigger, The Judgement Day, Everything That Rises Must Converge – through a series of encounters with blacks, a certain revelation comes to the protagonists of those stories, it is the shock of recognition which they experience, a deeper recognition of themselves with all their weaknesses, faults and even sins

§      religion stands at the center of her writing, all her writings offer the possibility of some religious explanation, religion closely connected with sex, which is one of the reasons for ambiguity within the texts

Carson McCullers

§      The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, A Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Café,

§      Clock without Hands – delas openly with racism