Tara Powell, The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012). xi, 266 pages. Reviewed by Veronica Makowsky, University of Connecticut Tara Powells The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature evokes a wide range of topics for consideration or reappraisal in southern literature, history, intellectual history, and culture. The title promises a broader canvas, however, than what the book delineates in depth. Powells primary concern is the treatment of the figure of the intellectual in selected fiction and memoirs of the second half of the twentieth century, by Flannery OConnor, Walker Percy, Doris Betts, Tim McLaurin, Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, Randall Kenan, and Gail Godwin. Aside from an evaluative history of intellectuals and scholarship in the first chapter, Powell does not attempt to consider southern intellectuals themselves (as opposed to their portrayal in fiction and memoir) throughout the twentieth century, nor does she attempt an in-depth analysis of the figure of intellectuals as portrayed in literary works in the first half of the twentieth century. Nor does she provide comprehensive lists and treatments of those intellectuals depicted within literary works in the latter half of the twentieth century. Instead, through extensive literary and historical analysis of selected works, Powell presents the ways eight significant, and, in some ways, representative authors struggle to identify a delicate balance: how does one value the life of the mind while keeping it in meaningful proportion to other aspects of life, from the practical to the spiritual? The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature continues the revision of southern literary history that began in the final quarter of the twentieth century with the entry of womens, African-American, ethnic, and working-class literature into the canon as well as a broadening of that canon to include genres beyond traditional belles lettres to autobiography, essays, film, television, and popular culture. In the scholarship of southern literature, this expansion came to fruition in 1998 with Michael Kreylings The Invention of Southern Literature which challenged the white, male, and conservative southern canon established by the Nashville Agrarians in the 1920s and 30s and which, through its handmaiden, the New Criticism, reigned supreme in literary circles for decades. Powell proceeds with expanding and revising that canon and posits that the agrarian tradition combined in distinctive ways with the peculiar institution of slavery and the southern literary tradition to promote the stereotype of southerners and even southern literature being notably, even fiercely, anti-intellectual (1). This stereotype, she argues, has persisted despite the revision of many other southern The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
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cultural stereotypes, owing to the willful participation of scholars, editors, and writers who have shaped what the designation southern has come to mean in both the local and national imaginations(1). She thus joins scholars such as Michael OBrien and Drew Gilpin Faust in challenging the claustrophobiainducing intensity with which the ostensible characteristics of the historical South have mirrored the South depicted in the Fugitive-Agrarian-New Critical canon of southern literature, and vice versa (11). Powells contribution to the revisionist view of southern literature and culture is her discovery and definition of three tropes of the intellectual from the late eighteenth century through the first half of the twentieth and her exploration of how and why these tropes are modified in the latter half of the twentieth century. These three tropes comprise the responses of southern intellectuals to a climate that is much worse than H. L. Menckens Sahara of the Bozarts: rather than a desert or vacancy, the South is filled with active hostility toward matters of the mind with which the intellectual must cope, but sometimes cannot. One coping strategy is the masked intellectual, like William Byrd or William Alexander Percy, whose ostensible vocation is that of planter or lawyer, for example, and whose pursuit of intellectual matters is a hobby and refreshment. While the masked intellectual can remain in the South, the exile cannot function in its repressive atmosphere and departs, a tradition that Poe initiates. Dysfunctional intellectuals are not only mocked as useless bumblers, but are often cast as psychologically maimed, sometimes to the extent that they commit suicide, such as Faulkners fictive Quentin Compson or the quite real intellectual W. J. Cash after confronting the dispiritingly violent Mind of the South in his 1941 intellectual history. Through her extensive literary analysis of selected works by eight writers after 1950, Powell explores how they modify the tropes of the masked, exiled, and dysfunctional intellectual and pursue viable alternatives that place the intellect in better proportion with other aspects of life and identity. For example, Powell does not attempt to cover all of Walker Percys novels but focuses on The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1971), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) to illustrate how Percy uses both Catholicism and existentialism to balance sciences contradictory simultaneous tendencies toward excessive abstraction, what Percy termed angelism, or obsessive materialism, or, for Percy, bestialism. Powell develops a taxonomy for the characters Flannery OConnor called her interleckchuls whose lack of proper proportion is privileging the intellect at the expense of the total spirit (29). In an interesting, expansive intellectual gambit, Powell moves the argument out of the library and academy by
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suggesting that, In the literary worlds of Betts and McLaurin, encounters with other people and nature are touchstones revealing the limitations of book learning, as well as exclusively mental engagement with the world and our own identities. At the same time, these authors affirm the value of book learning when properly applied to real life; indeed, intellectual life can turn into real life (22). In contrast, Godwin, according to Powell, suggests that identity is available to us in the resources of the academy, as much or perhaps more than anywhere else (179), a direct contradiction of the tenets of southern anti-intellectualism. Powells most original contributions come in two chapters that concern writers who did not come from the privileged upper-class backgrounds that the Fugitive Agrarians believed defined the best and only South. In Dislocated Academics and the New South Writer of Ideas, she analyzes the effects that the establishment of creative writing programs and creative writers within colleges and universities had on the identities of writers as southerners and intellectuals. While the relatively privileged Percy, OConnor, and Godwin were educated within the academy and interacted with it in various ways throughout their careers, their day jobs were not professorial. McLaurin and Betts, in contrast, came from working-class backgrounds but made their careers at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill). Powell examines the ways Betts and McLaurin found their marginal positions as creative writers within a department that emphasized literary criticism and scholarship both fruitful and frustrating since they were doubly marginalized: their positions as academics distanced them from their less educated families and communities yet provided them with the tools and perspective to write about them. In Intellectual Labor and Race Consciousness in Southern Fiction and Memoir, Powell shows how African-American writers were recently welcomed into the academy and could receive and give the educations so highly prized and so often denied during slavery and its aftermath. Yet here, as in the chapter on workingclass writers, Powell proves that not only have the times changed, but so have the aspirations of formerly excluded groups. In novels by Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, and Randall Kenan, she argues, contemporary southern AfricanAmerican writers present a new problem: how to rewrite the southern African American literary narrative in a world where self-abnegation in the face of community needs seems more and more like an out-of-date version of the story, limiting their abilities to write their best lives (139). The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature is a highly valuable addition to southern literary studies and intellectual history not despite, but
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perhaps because it cannot deliver on the sweeping promises of its title. Powells astute, evocative range and her groupings of representative authors and fine literary exegeses suggest myriad topics and writers for further study, not just of the literary past, but contemporary writing, particularly now that the twenty-first century is well on its way. Has southern anti-intellectualism become one with American anti-intellectualism with the ubiquity of mass media and the Internet? What about the intellectual aspirations of ethnic groups new to the South? In an era of increasingly online learning, will southern colleges and universities still exist in a form that expresses regional identity in terms of intellectual aspirations as well as intellectually antithetical athletics? Although these questions indicate a need to examine the intellectual in new contexts, there is a certain timelessness to the choice, as defined by Tara Powells parents when she was about to start college: gainful employment or beautify my mind (ix).
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