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Exploding the bordered text: Transgressive narrative in the American South
Abstract
In my study of Southern Narrative, I attempt to counter the general assumption that Southern literature is backward and to suggest a possible approach to that literature that is in keeping with the transgressive poetics of its major authors. In the process of integrating close textual readings of Southern texts with theoretical conceptualizations derived from the works of Burger, Bahktin, Barthes, Kristeva, and Foucault I hope to open a fissure in the wall of resistance to postmodern approaches that currently exists in the field. My argument is that the peculiar history of the South created a psychological and sociological landscape, of borders and border-crossings in which every movement outside of one's rigidly defined social position had drastic consequences for the transgressor. Further, I suggest that many Southern authors—including Jeanne Toomer, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and James Dickey—developed an artistic approach to this world that formally enacted the transgression of these borders. In the first chapter on Jean Toomer's Cane I use the theoretical approaches of Kristeva, Bhaktin, and Burger to investigate the process in which Toomer manipulates the avant-garde methodologies of the montage form to undermine the hierarchical social codes separating the world of the African Americans from that of Whites. In the second chapter on William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! I continue this line of approach, demonstrating how the poetics and basic conflicts in the novel derive from its characters' intense resistance to their proscribed social limitations. The third chapter focuses on how abject figures in Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples disrupt equally rigid social restrictions regarding gender. In the fourth chapter I study how James Dickey manipulates dialogic relationships in his poem “The Sheep Child,” setting up different worlds of reality and fantasy so that he may merge them. Finally I use my discussion of Dickey to speculate on how and why other contemporary Southern writers have and have not internalized the poetics of their literary forbears.
Subject Area
American literature|Modern literature|American studies|Literature
Recommended Citation
Peckham, Joel Bishop, "Exploding the bordered text: Transgressive narrative in the American South" (1999). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9929220.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9929220