Sustaining power: The poetry of the contemporary American South

This dissertation focuses on southern poetry from World War II to the present, an underwritten, yet vital field of southern literary culture that requires a fuller account of its significance to American literary criticism as well as southern studies. To trace the value of this poetry as a record of contemporary southern culture, this project explores what happens once the South begins to operate under transmodern conditions: increased (sub)urbanization, flexible capitalism, racial conflict manifested in the civil rights movement, the cultural trauma of Vietnam, and the ideological claims of current identity politics. Using recent interventions in the field of memory studies, Sustaining Power considers the investment of collective memory into particular geographic sites as constructed by poets, such as Allen Tate's Confederate cemetery, James Dickey's primal otherworld, Robert Penn Warren's antebellum Kentucky plantation, Yusef Komunyakaa's racially torn Louisiana, Charles Wright's abstract and repetitive Appalachian landscapes, Judy Jordan's sharecropper's graveyard, and Kate Daniels' working-class Richmond. In exploring the southern landscape as a space of the primal as well as the surreal, the pastoral as well as the grotesque, and in placing memory along an axis from the nostalgic to the traumatic, the personal to the collective, and the ethereal to the monumental, the dissertation gives a sense of the conflicting images of the South that appear in contemporary southern poetry. The project considers not only how this poetry is influenced by and influences the currents that drive and disrupt southern culture, but also interrogates how it reflects the South's changing position vis-a-vis American culture. Sustaining Power will open up new avenues for understanding the relation of aesthetic developments to the political, economic, and social history of the South after World War II, augmenting this general framework by incorporating within it more specialized theoretical methodologies that are new to southern studies, such as conceptual cartography, film theory, trauma studies, and countermemory work. At a time when critics have argued that the South is more Americanized, more homogenized, more "postsouthern" than ever, this project suggests new paradigms for understanding the continuing significance of southern literary culture.