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.