A broader premise for future study...

Beyond All the King’s Men, it seems it’s inherently possible to apply the lens of this essay to other noir narratives that employ first person, masculine narrators.  True, Burden appears sharply distinct from his Californian brethren given that his fallen state comes from his inability to take responsibility—hence marry—Anne Stanton, but the male narrators of the early 40’s (the boon time of Hammett, Chandler, and Noir Cinema) have built within them a similar ineffectual masculinity given that then narrators of these Californian incarnations sit out World War II.  Perhaps we can postulate a similar sort of gender based deprivation and shame inherent to these narrators in their inability to fight—or not wanting to fight—for their country and its just cause to end Nazism and Fascism across the globe.  Accordingly, how might we reconsider Philip Marlowe’s cynical humor and womanizing with this chip on his shoulder?  Certainly, reflexive masochism, in this regard, will provide further enticements for literary study.  

Complications in terms of AKM and women as Plot Devices

I think my analysis has provided some interesting complications in terms of feminist readings of AKM, particularly in the assertion that Anne's affair with Talos is staged so that Warren can fulfill the noir formulaic.  Anyway, my discussion of this point proceeds as follows: 

In terms of possible feministic readings of AKM, reflexive masochism, as I’ve appropriated it in this work, excitingly complicates Wilson’s and Ferriss’s analysis of role of female characters, particularly Anne Stanton, in terms of plot construction. Certainly, Wilson’s work in “Medusa, the Movies, and the King’s Men,” offers astute insight into the role of Sadie Burke, but both Wilson and Ferriss seem to comprehend Anne Stanton’s agency in her affair with Talos as a fathomless lacunae with the rationale behind her choice withheld by Warren in order to configure her into the fallen symbolic order prerequisite to the restorative questing of the typical noir, male protagonist.  True, the narrator allows Anne no voiced reason as to why she went to Talos other than he wasn’t like anybody she’d ever known, but this doesn’t tell us much and disappointingly limits any further understanding of Anne’s motives to Burden’s interpretation.  However, if we consider that AKM isn’t just Talos’s story, but Burden’s story too, we must understand that the entire tragedy of this text can be attributed to Burden’s inability to have sex with Anne when she first made herself available so many years ago.  If the younger, college-boy Burden had the moral certainty and self-mastery as Adam Stanton, then he would’ve gone through with it, they would’ve been married, and Adam wouldn’t have been killed after assassinating Talos.  Though this certainly doesn’t lend anymore agency to Anne in her affair with Talos that seemingly drops out of nowhere, it doesn’t put the blame on her shoulders.  Accordingly, in the grander sense of this novel’s telling, the narrating, heterodiegetic Burden, absorbs all these injuries in the telling because it’s his ultimate inability to be a man and sexually consummate his love with Anne that subsequently sparks the tragedy of the entire novel.  Furthermore, the narrating Burden relives each injury and takes the fault on himself according to the reflexive masochistic framework previously delineated.  As Silverman suggests, Burden, in taking on more than his share of responsibility—as Cass Mastern—he multiplies and deepens his own suffering in order to “aggrandize the self” in which such “martyrdom effects a primarily personal “triumph,” and produces in the ostensible sufferer a “mood of enlargement” (Silverman 327).  Ultimately, the whole of AKM can be seen as an apotheosis of Burden’s newfound virility where he becomes master of himself in the wake of Willie’s death.  

Conclusions and beyond

Here's how I'm thinking my conclusion:

Given the many versions of Burden available in each scene, the narration of AKM demonstrates Silverman’s notion of reflexive masochism in various ways.  Principally, we have two Burdens, the first being the Burden who moves along with Willie Talos’s rise and fall, the second being the narrator/speaker.  Still, a multilayered focalization exists given that the narrating Burden deftly conjures memories, not as he currently remembers them, but as the past version of Burden remembers them as appropriate to the dramatized/recounted moment.  Accordingly, while the first, homodiegetic Burden, revisits his past to appropriate Anne’s affair with Talos by eliminating her agency and responsibility as he constructions his theory of the Great Twitch, the second, heterodiegetic Burden identifies with Cass Mastern and takes on more than his portion of the “awful responsibility” by mastering it through the art of narration.  Though more ostensibly damaged and traumatized, the homodiegetic Burden who is seen experiencing pain in the aftermath of Anne’s affair with Talos, Burden the teller (who likely feels the hurt all the more because he is married to Anne) forces himself to receive this trauma once again, though behind the curtains, as he’s both the narrator and principal narratee of this telling.  On the surface, the Long Beach Burden who agonizes more actively resembles Silverman’s read on T.E. Lawrence, but that doesn’t exclude the narration itself as a reflexive masochistic act given that the ultimate, heterodiegetic Burden reengages his trauma with such attention and authenticity throughout all the past versions of himself that he conjures.

My primary passage and some initial notes

I thought it would be nice to share the primary passage I will study for my project and include some of my initial discussion which I will use in my paper.  This is Burden remembering his first night alone with in his convertible back when she was seventeen and he failed to reach across those “thousand miles” of leather cushion to make the first move:

I didn’t know why I didn’t reach over.  I kept assuring myself that I wasn’t timid, wasn’t afraid, I said to myself, hell, she was just a kid, what the hell was I hanging back for, all she could do would be to get sore and I could stop if she got sore.  Hell, I told myself, she wouldn’t get sore anyway, she knew what was up, she knew you didn’t sit alone in parked cars with boys to play checkers in the moonlight, and she had probably been worked over plenty, somebody had probably run the scales on her piano.  Then I assured myself that it wasn’t Adam that I was afraid of.  To hell with Adam, I told myself, did he think he could put lead seals on his sister’s drawers.  Hell, somebody had probably hosed her already. I played with that thought a second, and then all at once I was both hot and angry.  I started up in the seat, a sudden tumult of something in my chest. (AKM 383-84)

The reflexive masochism, the multilayered focalization, Burden’s faltering attempt to act sexually as a man: everything about this passage preeminently integrates into my project.  Still, before we jump into interpretation, we must disentangle the layers of focalization intrinsically inherent to this passage.  First—as I’ve already indicated—we must establish the point of narrating in that the apparent heterodiegetic Burden recreating/remembering this scene isn’t the ultimate heterodiegetic Burden that looks back from the novel’s conclusion.  This Burden is being revisited as he revisits his first romantic encounters with Anne.  Accordingly, the Burden who’s lost in the memory of this parked car liaison lounges on a motel bed in Long Beach.  The ultimate-narrator Burden conjures this past version of himself, who then conjures his college self.  This is a categorically important distinction given that each of these versions of Burden contain various disparate facts and worldviews.  To be clear: the homodiegetic Burden in this scene is a college boy pretending “he’s such a God-damned big man” (AKM 383). The second, remembering Burden, is the recently wounded Burden who’s just discovered that Anne has been sleeping with the Boss.  Interestingly enough, the reader infers that the sensibility, mood, and voice of this passage are imbued by the wounded Burden, not the “redeemed” Burden we meet at the novel’s end, precisely by the fact we haven’t met him yet.

Upon looking back on the online digital editions, I was surprised to see that so few were as well constructed as the Blake archive that me and my partner presented on.  Of course, Blake's work, with his blending of art and literature with his Illuminate Press, presents perhaps the ideal candidate for such scholarly work, it seems odd that so few authors receive similar attention, particularly in the case of Dickinson, who's publishers so decisively changed her poems from how they originally appeared by her own hand.  Still, the lack of such editions might bring us back to previous conversations where talked about the legitimacy of online publications, and how the status of what's online still seems to fall short of the esteem most feel for books. This is changing, and, given the Blake archive, should change, particularly in his case, considering how unique each of his printed books were.

As for other turns, it seems I've now discerned the key passages in AKM in which I'll apply my "reflexive masochist" lens.  It seems the moment when Burden discovers Anne has been sleeping with Talos and his eventual "Drowning by West" will be incredibly useful considering the many homodiegetic Is the author Burden conjures in recounting his relationship to Anne.

Some Recommended Books

Though I might provide some of my Annotation Highlights for the class:

Gender Trouble

This essential text in gender theory scrutinizes the “naturalness” of gender under various philosophical, anthropological, psychoanalytical, and political frameworks.  Butler reveals that gender cannot be separated from identity and that persons only become intelligible to themselves and others by becoming gendered.  Though throughout much of the novel Burden fails to live up to the standards of Southern masculinity in which he’s immersed, we can understand—through Butler’s work—the reflexive masochism latent Jack Burden’s narration in that he must continually present himself in some masculine fashion in order to effectively conjure a past self to make his agency intelligible to the reader (and, subsequently, to himself).   

Living to Tell...

Phelan’s work singlehandedly pioneered the notion of an implied author whose agency steers and generates any given text.  The implied author isn’t the real author, but a subset of the real author who imbues their text with their values and aesthetic standards.  This notion of an author outside the text requiring a constructed agent in the textual field to perform the text, can be applied to Burden the author—though in a decidedly artificial and microcosmic manner—as he looks back and conjures (and separates) the various versions of himself in the book.  Also, Living to Tell has a wonderfully useful glossary of narrative theory terminology.

Southern Masculinity since Reconstruction:

In contemporizing male tropes in terms of the time period of AKM (1930s), Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on Manhood in the South since Reconstruction shows how notions of “Muscular Christianity,” evolutionary theory, and Nietzsche’s overman, pushed the “new” Southern masculinity into a category of behavior defined more by will, sexuality, and physical force.  This fits Talos perfectly in both his philandering and his drive to give Louisiana a more modern/dynamic economy.  Similarly, since manhood in the South has been typically classified as governed by the passions rather than intellect (a quality Burden readily applies to himself), Burden can’t be a leader and must subjugate his intellectual agency to another, more muscular, patriarch.

Last Class, Some New Reworkings

It was nice getting to meet some of the new faculty last week.  I particularly enjoyed meeting Matt Hooley, whose academic interested mirror many of my own: Modernism, Ecocriticism, the relationship between art and literature.  Besides supplying me with a nice reading list to beef up on ecocriticism, he also gave me some advice on how I might be able to blend Modernism with Ecocriticism by examining works of art from the Modernist period. For those interested in ecocriticism, you might want to look up Lawrence Buell and Tim Morton. 

As for other updates, it seems I needed to reframe the narrative theory component of my research project accordingly: 

Where Willie is a vacuum of volition, Burden suffers an identity crisis that precludes him from entering Anne Stanton’s life as legitimate suitor because he has no presiding worldview where he can be seen as master of himself or subsequently—in terms of Southern culture—a viable husband and patriarch to Anne Stanton.  All this only highlights the performative aspect of Burden’s own narration and how the noir cynicism and self-loathing latent to his homodiegetic voice and characterizations are a manifestation of his youthful inability to become a true gentleman like Adam, Anne Stanton’s brother, who exhibits morality, confidence, and strength.  More of an thinker than a doer, the homodiegetic Burden has been thrown into a perpetual state of affected impassivity whereby his cynicism and self-loathing can still be seen as inherently masculine, though largely ineffectual in a paternalistic sense, if we employ the lens of what Kaja Silverman calls “Reflexive Masochism” to certain segments of Burden’s recreated/homodiegetic narration.

Southern Manhood and AKM, old an new

Friend in his text, Southern Manhood, attributes an “honor-mastery” paradigm to masculinity in the antebellum South whereby the son honors his father by carrying on his cause and livelihood as he endeavors to create and reign over his own household. Oddly, though, Friend describes this “mastery” as being internally realized and achieved through personal conduct, not by public acknowledgement. Accordingly, the homodiegetic Burden—a self-professed student of history, unsure of his father’s identity—fails to live up to these standards allows himself to become mastered by another (Talos). Though this symbolic order is restored by the end of the novel as Burden moves into Judge Irwin (his biological father’s house), marries Anne Stanton, and begins telling his story, the homodiegetic Burden inveterately struggles with how he’s supposed to live his life. More than anything, Southern Manhood; Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South makes a clear distinction between honor, which was acted out for public consumption, while mastery was achieved internally. This contradiction elaborates the notion of masculinity as gender performance in that Burden’s narration betrays his former self’s lack of masculine self-mastery and assurance.

In contemporizing male tropes in terms of the time period of AKM (1930s), Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on Manhood in the South since Reconstruction shows how notions of “Muscular Christianity,” evolutionary theory, and Nietzsche’s overman, pushed the “new” southern masculinity into a category of behavior defined more by will, sexuality, and physical force. This fits Talos perfectly in both his philandering and to his drive to give Louisiana a more modern/dynamic economy with his road projects and hospitals. Outwardly, Talos is seen as a savior by promoting industrial/economic growth and dismantling the good-old-boy networks (though he ironically establishes his own) that mired the old south. Similarly, since manhood in the south has been typically classified as governed by the passions rather than intellect (Burden typifies himself as a man of ideas), Burden can’t be a leader and must subjugate his intellectual agency to another patriarch.

The Battle of Editions

All though I still think the change of Stark's name to Talos to Polk's "Restored Edition" of AKM highly questionable (given Talos's literary pedigree, I wonder if a footnote would've sufficed given how out of place and literary the name sounds), I've decided to go with this "restored" version of AKM particularly because Polk argues that the original incarnation of Jack Burden was even more "smart alecky" than his published form.  Polk also argues that Warren's editors often scaled back some of his more sordid depictions for the sake of decorum and these omissions have proved to be quite sardonic.  Scenes involving both Burden and Anne Stanton have more bite to them in terms of descriptive flair and do a lot of work highlighting his reflective masochistic state.  Similarly, Polk's restored edition takes into account the point of telling (Burden, we learn by the end of the book, is married to Anne) and thus keeps passages which complicate the relationship between of the Hetrodiegetic and Homodiegetic Is.  Beyond these considerations, most of the scholarship of AKM has been grounded in the previous edition, thus making further use of Polk's edition all the more enticing.      

Notes on my Enumerative Bib.

 Typically, I've found my research taking me four essential  directions: First, studies of AKM and of Warren’s work in general; Second, studies in Masculinity, Gender, and Feminism; Third, Southern Studies and Southern Masculinity; Fourth, Noir and Narrative Theory.  All lot of the Warren and AKM sources are dated (typically in the 60’s and 70’s, with nothing more recent than 2007), but incredibly beneficial in grounding and contrasting my analysis from established approaches.  In terms of Masculinity, I found it beneficial to lump Southern Studies and Southern Masculinity together in that the frame of “Southerness” often adheres to representations in literature, as the broader topics of Masculinity, Gender, and Feminism, seem more rooted in National Identity, Anthropology, Politics, and Gender Studies.  The other three categories of this enumerative bibliography are typically more contemporary than that of the first in that most of the scholarship listed here comes from the 90’s to as recent as 2010.  Since the topics are combined for my project, it seemed only natural to combine Noir studies and Narrative Theory into one category since it will be the combined application of certain Noir tropes and their inherent Narrative approaches in which I will attempt to entrench Jack Burden’s first person narration in an inherently Reflective Masochistic state.  

Applying Lenses

Evaluating preconditions of the Heterodiegetic “I”.  By saying that Jack Burden speaks from a “fallen” perspective, it’s imperative to construct what that previous state may have been.  Very little in All the King’s Men gives us any access to what Burden was like before meeting Willie Stark, but there are some moments, like when he recalls Anne Stanton and her brother swimming in their youth.  In this particular reminiscence, Jack plunges into the moment when he simultaneously realized his love for Anne, yet also his inability to be her man, because he’s not morally assure of himself as Adam.  Oddly, the look intended for Anne, the one full of want, doesn’t stay on her, but then shunts to Adam who recognizes the intent and grows embarrassed by it.  What ensues is a quick comparison between Jack and Adam where Jack realizes he—though as intelligent and capable—lacks the ethical certainty that Adam has.  Accordingly, Jack cannot be Anne’s “man” because he doesn’t have authority over himself.  Moments like this, compared to, say, the time Jack disabuses Willie during his first campaign of his chances at winning and he feels his “heart suddenly go soft and fluid in my chest like a melting snowball you squash in your hand,” (AKM 127) offer many great counterpoints in terms of homo-sociability and language, especially given the nostalgic exactitude—and grace—Jack lends to his memory.  Similarly, Jack, though he feels terrible for being the one to crush Willie (this is the Wille before his Talos like transformation) and his rag to riches aspirations of wealth and power, can only permit himself any tenderness by appropriating it in masculine way.  Notice how he melts, softens, but only by the end of the analogy do we see a fist closing around the snowball.  If this isn’t reflexive masochism made narrative, I don’t know what is.

Notes on the Enumerative Bib

As I move forward into collecting sources for my Enumerative Bibliography, it's been interesting to consider what types of terms I should classify these various texts by without being too broad or too narrow (whereby only a couple sources fall under a particular heading).  Sure, on the surface, these headings seem like a small thing, but I'm beginning to understand that they actually have an import on the formation of my projects.  Just saying "Southern Masculinity" or "Noir Narratives" begin to organize more than the sources, but also shape our thinking and galvanize contexts for my critical applications.  Similarly, it will be useful to hone key organizing concepts in which I might pull sources as you write and apply various frameworks/lenses to the reading(s) I've in mind for my primary source.  Also, it's nice that WorldCat has immediate citations in all formats.    

Our class discussion

It seems in discussing Gerald Egan's article "Radical Moral Authority and Desire: The Image of the Male Romanitc Poets in Frontispiece Portraits of Byron and Shelly," our conversation center upon what we could do in our own that mimics or borrows from this essay.  Looking back at all the research I did last weekend, I now have 40-50 sources, many of them are books, it seems that any notion or goal I had for my project changed--or should I say gained vitality--as I continued to search various terms, critical lenses, and authors.  Given these experiences, it seems trying to force fit an agenda too early may disrupt progress as you continue to absorb sources.  As I read, ideas and conflicts came to me that I hadn't realized about AKM and my ideas adjusted accordingly.  For example, the noir elements are certainly now obvious to that book, I wouldn't even had considered how that genre might be grounding the novel as a whole given the descriptive depth and beauty of the language, especially in terms of philosophy, if I had investigated feminist readings of the book.  Likewise, I would have simple adapted cookie-cutter notions of Burden's crisis of identity (in terms of Existentialism and Modernism) and applied them to me investigation if I hadn't done significant reading about Masculinity and Southern Culture.  I guess the point I gleamed here is that initial research should first shape your project, before we can appropriate more sources to reinforce it.  First we must ask what can be done, before investigating what would help accomplish this task.    

Methodology in progress

This is my methodology-in-progress for my research project:

            Out of a research framework consisting in Southern Studies, Masculinity, and Feminist interpretations of Noir literature, I will then construct a reading of various key points in All the King’s Men, paying initial attention to Burden and Stark’s first meeting and the nihilistic ennui that consumes Burden before Willie Stark consolidates Burden into his fascist ranks.  Similarly, I will evaluate this paternalist relationship and set it against the other model’s of masculinity (typically paternal) Burden has available, paying keen attention to Judge Irwin, Adam Stanton, and Willie Stark, and how they each contrast to the persona projected by Burden’s narration.  From there I will move to the first mentions of a few, key women who appear in the book: Sadie Burke, Burden’s mother, and Anne Stanton, as I tie together the imperatives driving the style and content of Burden’s narration and how these imperatives render the narration a recognizably masculine performance though he has fails throughout the novel to achieve an active masculinity like Willie Stark, Adam Stanton, or Judge Irwin, ensnared as he is in this “Reflective Masochistic” state. 

Some further considerations...

            Beyond these evaluations and investigations, my research project might be used to stage a larger assertion that grounds “Reflexive Masochism” as a prerequisite condition to many of the first person, white, male narrators of noir literature and cinema.  Also, this research might go a long way into further informing gender performance as a key element to any first person narration in terms Narrative Theory.

Framing my Research Project on AKM

Since so much of Warren’s All the King’s Men focuses on Jack Burden’s relationship to various potential father figures, I think it would be interesting to launch a gender-based/feminist oriented reading of the novel.  Full of self loathing and erasure, Jack Burden, the narrator, has a deeply cynical voice akin to what you’d expect from the noir films at the time.  This capacity seems to relate to the sociological idea that masculinity—as a compulsive performance—has two principal affectations: first, there are outward pantomimes—called “Surface Acting” (Hochschild) where a man displays the proper—in terms of masculinity—emotion appropriate to any given situation; then there is a more profound sense of performance where, over time, men actually bring themselves to feel or block an emotion.  Like Chandler’s Marlow, it takes some inundation into the mind of Jack Burden to understand the negative emotional distance in which he frames the issues and relationships that preoccupy his narrative.  Throughout the book, the Burden’s philosophical universe changes drastically as he tries understand his agency in the world and model his philosophical outlook on the various father figures he has absorbed throughout his life.  Willie Stark, on the other hand, is a creature of will.  This farm-boy turned fascist is self-made—in the American ideal—but emotionally unavailable to any situation or character who cannot contribute to his political power.  Accordingly, it will be interesting to examine in terms of homosociability how Jack Burdern became a henchman of a man he clearly despises.              

Though later cut out for the far superior opening that now exists, the Polk’s “Restored Edition” retains—in the appendix—the original opening of the book where Burden unabashedly refers to Willie (though recognized a dark principal of political power) as a son of a bitch.  Anyway, it will be interesting also to examine the sort of ennui and nihilism that Jack Burden found himself in when he was recruited to Stark’s inner circle of factotums and minions.  Out of work and basically floating through the day in a sort of womanizing, boozy bliss, he gets the call from Stark and says yes without hesitation, despite his initial hostility towards the hapless Stark in his first—futile—run for governor.  Ultimately, it seems Burden, develops a sort of “Reflective Masochism” whereby he brutalizes himself internally for not being intellectually self-sufficient (thus manlike) enough to finish his PhD thesis (which would contain an inherent, comprehensive worldview).  Out of this inward nihilism, Willie Stark, with his indomitable volition and will to power, becomes paternalistically and homosocially attractive.  Thus, it would also be interesting to study how masculinity shapes fascism, both in terms of the “boss” who is clearly a vestige of the old southern stereotype of manliness (self-made, in control, haunting/looming, and worshipped) and this new type of failing masculinity whose only agency comes in loathing the self and its feeble powers to ascertain a viable position in the universe.

Along the way, it seems I must study the formation of Burden’s relationship with Stark (by comparison this paternal relationship will contain all other father figures); Burden’s relationship to Anne Stanton and how she stands apart from his typical womanizing; and, finally, a detailed analysis of Burden’s relationship to his mother.

Research Notes on my All the King's Men Project

My research thus far has taken me all over the map: From whiteness in Southern culture, to gender studies in Southern Literature, to ideas about Masculinity/Manhood in America, I’ve tried ground my project in a more current framework of gender and gender performance.  Surprisingly, only one major book-length work I’ve encounter has been devoted entirely to a feminist reading of All the Kings Men—Sleeping With the Boss: Female Subjectivity and Narrative Pattern in Robert Penn Warren, by Lucy Ferriss.  There are other anthologized essay collections like The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren that contain essay’s like “Medusa, Movies, and All the King’s Men” (Deborah Wilson) that make explicit connections between the book’s narration and the film noir of the 20’s-40’s, but this focuses on female representations in the book.  Not many, it seems, have focused on Masculinity and issues of Homosociability in AKM.  This is exciting for me, because it allows me the opportunity to combine a critical reading of the text (my favorite) under various critical and cultural lenses.           

            Typically, the scholarship as it exists does examine Burden’s various vicarious paternal relationships, but always in terms of his metaphysics and Stark’s—narrated—teleology.  Accordingly, it will be interesting to take this conversation “out of the columns and into the colored lights” of gender performance. I've done various searches under the terms of Masculinity in Southern Literature, Gender Crisis in Southern Literature, Masculinity and Fascism, Gender Performance, Masculinity in America, each providing decent yields in various, useful secondary sources.  Over the past few days, it's been nice to see how these various concepts have combined to recast or intensify my initial reading of AKM.  New connections come to me all the time and it will be interesting to see how I can organize and relay these multiplying insights.    

Response to one of the questions on my ERP

It seems in my previous ERP I kept making the distinction--however superficially--between details seeming peripheral to the text (watermarks, signatures, catchwords, the paper, how much white space existed on that paper, etcetera)  and the narrative composed in the text itself.  Rereading this, it's now apparent to me that I'd still clung to the old idea of the central primacy of the author and her actual accomplishments on the page, instead of embracing the ways other facets of the"Communication Circuit" manifest themselves in the book itself.  When thinking about descriptive bibliography, it's the book, as O'Donnell states, that we must first listen to, not necessarily the narrative contained within its pages.  This reversal is key.  For instance, since ever book in the pre-industrialized were purchased then bound on a case by case basis, one can tell much about the status of the work at the time of its binding if, say multiple inks were used (this would be expensive), or the source of its paper by its watermark.  Anyway, as prompted by Dr. Snead's comments, these issues do become central, not peripheral, and when it comes to Descriptive Bibliography, you search the material body of a book--even in terms of its text--and look for anomalies in the typeset or traceable clues that will key us into the world of the book as imprinted by commercial, social, and political forces.     

The first thing I think I might need to circulate about my project—and about this class in general—is that I need to be comfortable with the fact that I’m a novice.  Certainly, this is difficult, considering the fact that I’m thirty-five, have an MFA (thus, supposedly, competent in the realm of fiction), and have taught others to research in Freshman Composition, but—I’ve realized after a wonderful chat with Dr. Snead—the professionalism, authority, and knowledge I hope to otherwise exude has to be left at the door.  Not only are we forced to start from the ground up, we’re expected to.  It’s ok that we don’t know the best methods or academic journals or all the criticism out there.  This course was designed to inform us.  Despite this understanding, however, you still have to engage your project with authority and confidence (particularly in the writing) even though you aren’t yet and expert in whatever topic or field you’re engaging.  I liken this approach to those first stories I composed in my first graduate workshop where I wrote like I knew all the rules and possible perspectives people could take to my work only to find later—post workshop—that my knowledge—though expansive—did have limitations.  Now, I realize I just have to be more conscious of this process, that’s all.  Anyway, this realization came with some relief, and I thought I would share with the rest of the class.

As for the research, also in my meeting with Dr. Snead I finally gained a comprehensive perspective of the project I hope to do in research methods and how I can tie my work and research into the critical issues I’m already facing as an author.  Before we begin, it seems—at least to me—that at this stage we should be looking at issues and not individual works or authors.  Maps after all contain many destinations, and, if want to generate a good one, we should allow for variety of routes between each of them.  Anyway, the time of post-graduate academic study where one picks an author and focuses on them is long gone (I got my BA in English and Philosophy in 2000).  It is all about an intersection of various fields or disciplines working within literature than a constellation of two or three different thinkers/writers.  Or so it seems to me.  Anyway, in my case, writing as I do about Kentucky, I find it problematic that the only literature that gets published out of this region has a rural—sometimes gothic—flare.  When I say I’m a Kentucky author, I realize typically all the lit. mags will expect me to write in this fashion.  Never mind that Louisville is a diverse metropolis with over 600,000 people, or that Hazard (where my mother is from) has a severe prescription drug problem.  They want blood on the farm or in the woods or comely, wise tales praising the ways of the land or the sages that occupy this old wisdom.  This is a cheap cutout for sure, but the problem is that Kentucky (and much of the rest of the south) isn’t even remotely the place it was thirty years ago.    I didn’t grow up with religion (another hallmark of the Kentucky brand is some sort of biblical inflection) and have instead posited the natural world as the source of my mythos and, in many ways, magical realism has much more to say to me than the Gospel.  Kentucky is a knobby jungle—at least the part I like to write about—crawling with vines and briar and bugs of all kinds of biting sorts.  In my opinion, nature is obscure and wondrous enough to encompass/accommodate the robust, metaphysical mysteries that religion previously (and this is in my case) imbued.  Similarly, I remember attending a reading with a prominent Kentucky author where he said that he can’t even write about the Kentucky of today, but instead engages a forgotten, almost mythical past that seems more real to his idea of the Bluegrass state than its present incarnation.  This only further corroborated my intimation that The South isn’t what people want to believe that it is. Not anymore.  Accordingly, it seems my major preoccupation is how do we engage this current Kentucky—in my case the Kentucky that attributes to The South—in our creative writing? 

Ultimately, no matter what direction or topic I take up in my research, it will always return to this idea of cultural identity and how we define ourselves against the institutions and systems of our past.  In my opinion, the contrast between how southerners (and Kentuckians) want to consider themselves has never been more disparate from how they actually are.  The south is more urban, (more people live now in cities than on the countryside) diverse, and—though it has taken much time—less patriarchic.  The interstate cities have more economic opportunities and the remote, satellite towns like Hazard are threatened—beyond their drug issues—with economic extinction.   

In terms of this research guide, it seems it’s best to put the broadest terms first and then work your way in, trusting that those broader categories to include other prevalent topics (like maybe race, class, and gender).

So my criteria might look like:

1.  20^th Century American Lit.

2. Regionalism.

3. Southern Lit and Culture.

4. Eco-Criticism

5. (Whiteness studies.)   

Again I think it’s best to work your way down from the broadest to most specific.  Again, since I’m interested in how the South has changed over the last forty or fifty years, I think 20^th Century American Lit. represents a broad enough platform in which to start.  Each subsequent stage becomes more focused.  Anyway, the main idea is to engage this research realizing that my central contradiction/dilemma lies between the misconceived South of today and prototypical South propagated through the articles/texts/ and narratives of the past.