southern bigotry

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southern bigotry

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1aluncurthose First Message
Oct 8, 2007, 5:22 am

hello;I have just joined your group;I read much southern writing but do experience tremors of fear and disquiet:
signs of the old south.Exploring the American Civil War last year (shelby foote,etc), on the net I stumbled unwittingly upon such sclerotic aryan rants as your own "dixiereader" delivered. Ambiguous and dilatory attitudes to racial equality in Faulkner, dark unmitigated images of Others in McCarthy, chauvinism and machismo and dixie flag bravado (Harry Crews and Barry Hannah);fine writing but not uncontaminated.Either hiding such attitudes or deliberately ignoring their existence, critics tacitly allow them to persist.

2Dystopos
Oct 8, 2007, 11:21 am

The rhetoric of "contaminated" literature is troubling. I hope that we, as readers and critics, are able to make more of this literature than a one-dimensional litmus test for bigotry.

In any case, I would rather this forum be used to promote ideas, not to attack individuals.

3frogbelly
Oct 8, 2007, 12:36 pm

Hear Hear. As if southern literature (and culture) is the only genre that has shades of prejudice. We have to take the bad with the good.

4jhowell
Oct 8, 2007, 5:24 pm

I must step in to defend #1 though -- while I admit to being a neophyte in this genre (partly why I joined this group) and that much of alun..'s post goes over my head -- I, too, have experienced tremors of fear and disqiuet while reading 'Southern lit'

For me, reading Faulkner recently for the first time -- very distubing in regards to race and misogeny, defended as a realist, a product of his times -- but disturbing nonetheless. I don't think it makes it bad literature -- but I agree as readers and critics we do need to acknowledge this. And what about O'Connor advocating for Christian jihad? And I can barely understand what McCarthy is trying to say, but I have figured out it isn't peace, love and understanding?

So - I know what he/she is trying to say.

5Cateline
Oct 8, 2007, 10:51 pm

As a born and bred Southerner I have to say that in our family the disturbing rants that were spoken of above were not thought of in any way, shape, form or manner. Frankly in polite society they were and are not condoned.
I have however run into many rants by some that don't know what they are talking about degrading and assuming many hurtful and untrue things about the South.
So as always there is right as well as wrong on both sides, and as long as no one talks about it, it shall continue.

Sorry, that is one of my pet peeves.

6KromesTomes
Oct 9, 2007, 11:12 am

I have to weigh in here to say that many authors writing in the 1950s and before reflect their society's feelings about things like race and religion ... it's definitely not just a Southern thing ... as just one example, Graham Greene sprinkled (at least his early) works with anti-semitic slurs ...

7Dystopos
Oct 9, 2007, 11:34 am

There is certainly much to the treatment of race and prejudice in literature.

Southern literature tends to tackle those issues more directly than most because racial divisions and tensions have been front and center in the lives of southerners.

In my opinion writers like Dickens or Flaubert explored the same kind of deeply-rooted injustices, and revealed their own unsupportable prejudices, as surely as Faulkner or O'Connor. But without the galvanic charge of race the smell just isn't as acrid.

I agree that these issues must be discussed. I only caution that the discussion should be mature, civil, and open-minded.

8andyray
Nov 1, 2007, 5:11 am

shades of political correctness pervade the above rants. The fact is the Deep (capital D) South (capital S) has its own culture, separate and distinct presence from the rest of the country. As a Yankee lad in Melbourne and Daytona Beach before air conditioning and the vast influx of Yankees, I guess I understand it better than most transplants. After all, when you go to school in Melbourne and don't even think to wonder why all the black kids you see across the tracks are absent from the school, well, it was normal. And this was as recent as the early 1960s. I don't believe mankind was meant to be assimilated in one great anonymous non-culture of political perfection. I think we wind up with sluts and druggies as our heroes. (Brittany Spears? Paris Hilton? Robert Downey Jr.? Keith Richards? the Insane Clown Posse? The Deep South still exists in 2007, but it isn't found in the coasts of Florida or the depths of Jacksonville and Atlanta, necessarily. Here in Volusia County, Florida, political correctness has demanded that Twain's Huckleberry Finn not be taught because of that big, nasty N word. Personally, the buzz word of this educational generation is one that I despise: "inappropriate." Now dodgeball is inappropriate. Now bringing a swiss army knife to school is inappropriate. let's just start a national movement called "Bush's Youth" or "Republican Youth" (comme Hitler Youth) and be done with it.

9BarkingMad First Message
Nov 5, 2007, 2:35 pm

Interesting note - Oprah Winfrey chose As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury and Light In August for her 2005 Summer of Faulkner reading selections.

10DromJohn
Nov 5, 2007, 3:01 pm

"Sweet Home Alabama" always needs to be paired with "Southern Man."

11geneg
Nov 5, 2007, 9:24 pm

Or maybe "Strange Fruit".