In the first part, the diploma thesis will deal with the characteristics of the literature of the American South and will provide an overview of its main themes (history of the region, the importance of the family, life in a small community, man's conflict with religion, the sense of justice, the sense of humor and others). In the overview of American Southern authors, it will try to characterize typical features of southern prose, and set borders of the region. The main task of the thesis will be the analysis of William Faulkner's short stories: A Rose for Emily, Red Leaves, Dry September, That Evening Sun, Mountain Victory and Barn Burning. Based on the short story analysis, it will focus on Faulkner's relation to the American South. Part of the thesis will be a chapter dedicated to the grotesque genre and to the literary category of American Gothic.

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As a reassessment of the southern grotesque, this dissertation places Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and William Faulkner in context and conversation with the fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky. While many southern artists and intellectuals have testified to his importance as a creative model and personal inspiration, Dostoevsky’s relationship to southern writers has rarely been the focus of sustained analysis. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s deeply positive understanding of grotesque realism, I see the grotesque as an empowering aesthetic strategy that, for O’Connor, McCullers, and Faulkner, captured their characters’ unfinished struggles to achieve renewal despite alienation and pain. My project suggests that the preponderance of a specific type of character in their fiction—a physically or mentally deformed outsider—accounts for both the distinctiveness of the southern grotesque and its affinity with Dostoevsky’s artistic approach. His grotesque characters, consequently, can fruitfully illuminate the misfits, mystics, and madmen who stand at the heart—and the margins—of modern southern fiction. By locating one source of the southern grotesque in Dostoevsky’s fiction, I assume that the southern literary imagination is not directed incestuously inward toward its southern past but also outward beyond the nation or even the hemisphere. This study thus offers one of the first evaluations of Dostoevsky’s impact on southern writers as a group.

This thesis examines the way Flannery O'Connor's stories draw upon and transfigure various biblical texts. With sometimes shocking freedom, she twists open the original stories or references, reworking and redistributing their basic elements. Often reversing the polarity of the original stories, O'Connor's stories dramatize elements of biblical texts coming alive in different times and social settings and with quite different outcomes. At the same time, her stories still address many of the same issues as the biblical texts she transforms. This study focuses on three O'Connor stories: "A Good Man is Hard to Find," which reworks the story of the rich young ruler in Matthew 19, Mark 10, and Luke 18; "Parker's Back," which transforms elements of Moses' encounter with the burning bush in Exodus juxtaposed with Saul's conversion experience in Acts 9; and "Judgment Day," which interacts with portions of Paul's descriptions of the resurrection of the dead in 1 Corinthians 15. This study draws upon the work of theologically-oriented O'Connor scholars, as well as O'Connor's own letters and essays. I hope, through this approach, to open up a new way of responding to O'Connor's biblical echoes. / Master of Arts

Though many scholars have explored the memory of slavery in Southern literature, my project expands these readings through a hybrid critical methodology from the fields of trauma studies, African American studies, historiography, and psychoanalysis to articulate how texts about the antebellum past enable later Southern authors to imagine present and future race relations in the South. I analyze how the particularities of the myriad afterlives of slavery – particularly in the economic, social, and political subjugation and terrorization of African Americans – are expressed or repressed in literature about the antebellum past, and argue that these texts demonstrate the varying processes by which white supremacy is enacted in the Jim Crow era. I argue in my first chapter that the plantation fictions of Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris commingle ideologies of antebellum paternalism and contemporary white supremacy to cast the future South as one founded on the reimagining of black subservience. My second chapter examines how black authors Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt revise plantation romance, their techniques of masking and doubling enabling them to create an alternative collective memory that exposes the trauma of slavery and the fictive constructs of paternalism. Nonetheless, their lack of success outside this accommodationist genre exposes the limitations of black voice. My third chapter considers the portrayal of race and racism in white Southern women’s writings about the Civil War; Margaret Mitchell and Caroline Gordon explore the idea of modern white female freedom as contingent upon the continued subjugation of African Americans. I argue that Mitchell’s and Gordon’s novels displace the history of slavery –in fact, erase its very presence –as a kind of fantasy of white supremacy in the 1930s. In my fourth chapter, I analyze how William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished fluctuates between anxiety about and aggrandizement of the antebellum past, thereby demonstrating the difficulties of modifying white Southern collective memory. The conclusion reads Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God through her protagonist’s constitution of a storied self, one which enables her to recuperate the traumatic past of slavery.

TONIGHT IS THE NIGHT I COME UNGLUED By Laurah Norton Raines Under the Director of John Holman ABSTRACT This thesis is comprised of a collection of stories concerning adolescents involved in the North Carolina and Atlanta punk rock subcultures. The thesis, which contains six stories, focuses on the crisis moments in the lives of the teenagers and is firmly rooted in contemporary southern culture. The first three stories center on a Georgia native, Aaron, and his aimless adventures in small towns and big punk clubs. The second set of stories is all based in the city of Greensboro, North Carolina, and each concerns a different adolescent girl. INDEX WORDS: Creative Writing, Punk, Greensboro, North Carolina, Georgia, Atlanta, Adolescence, Teenagers, Thesis

Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (GWTW) has long been termed an "epic" of the American South. The implications of that term, however, have not been fully investigated, particularly as they concern generic criteria. How can we assign the generic characteristics of the epic narrative to GWTW? Using theories of the epic as postulated by Hegel, Lukács, Merchant, and Bakhtin, this study examines the ways in which GWTW writes the Southern nation into history, and how the objective portrayal of its epic heroine reflects the emergence of the New Southern nation. More specifically, it looks at how the depiction of Scarlett O'Hara's "everyday" existence reflects the larger New Southern identity and consciousness. The "everyday" or quotidian experience has been defined by such scholars as Henri Lefebvre, Michel deCerteau and Joe Moran as the space in which the life as lived is developed in all its minutia and the manner by which the state acts upon that existence. Using these ideas as a framework, we begin to see how the narrative of Scarlett's day-to-day existence functions as a voice for the New South. Finally, questions of how GWTW enters into the "everyday" of contemporary American culture are explored.

"Not My Father's Son" explores a new generation of white southern sons in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century whose resistance to the problematic construction of masculinity and the violence needed to sustain it allows them both the freedom to acknowledge openly their same-sex desires and to embrace life, as opposed to death, in the face of a homosexual identity that lies before them. Rather than excavate queer subjects that may have been coded in earlier mid-twentieth-century texts, my dissertation examines the psychological shifts concerning white masculinity that must occur for these gay subjects to exist openly and without compromise. In addressing the struggle these sons face in revising a problematic vision of the father, I discuss selected fiction and non-fiction from southern, white male authors written in the past thirty years, including two recently published memoirs by gay, southern, white men, Kevin Jennings and Kevin Sessums; a memoir by Lewis Nordan; and selected fiction from both Nordan and Jim Grimsley. I argue that these historical and literary depictions of white, gay, southern men in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century invoke a new paradigm in which the sons' challenge to the historical forces of supremacy (racism, sexism, and homophobia) inherent in the legacy of the white southern father opens up new spaces for both gay characters and gay men to exist. / acase@tulane.edu

In her essay, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor notes, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one” (44). In the introduction to this collection, I investigate the importance of the grotesque, gothic, and surreal elements that tend to make up the depictions of the South in the works of authors such as Flannery O’Connor and Brad Watson and several horror writers, such as Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and H.P. Lovecraft, exploring how horror can be used to emphasize the stranger elements of Southern fiction. In my own stories, I present both realistic depictions of suffering and sin in the South, as well as the strange and surreal, presenting the South not just as a world for freaks, but as a freakish world in and of itself.

Grotesque elements in literature are often negatively viewed as an author’s attempt to simply twist reality in an effort to shock or entertain the reader. However, as I explain in my critical introduction, this view disregards the potential of the grotesque. It often has a specific purpose within a plot. It reveals things about characters that would not otherwise be exposed. I discuss this function of the grotesque in the works of Flannery O’Connor, Edgar Allan Poe, Truman Capote, and Brad Watson, and then show how these authors’ uses of the grotesque have influenced my own writing. In my collection of short fiction, each story contains grotesque elements that reveal and emphasize my characters’ hopes and fears.