| Under the influence of the wave of globalization,the topics of American Southern literary works have gradually separated from the classic motifs of Southern literature,such as history,place,religion,family,etc.,and the local characteristics have weakened.Thus,as regional literature,the future of Southern literature has become a matter of controversy.At the beginning of the 21 st century,the New Southern Studies scholars,represented by Jon Smith,Houston Baker,and Dana Nelson,have advocated cross-regional studies,moving away from the local to avoid so-called regional parochialism.During the development of the NSS,the idea of“Southern studies without ‘The South’” even emerged.This new research idea not only has failed to completely solve the question of where the Southern literature should go,but has also led to the ontological dilemma of Southern literature research.Based on this,this dissertation argues that it is necessary to retrace the“problematizing” writing strategy in the postmodern turn of the South in the 1970 s.This “problematizing” writing,while questioning and critiquing the classic Southern motifs,can pay sufficient attention to the problems arising in the development of Southern society,thus providing a reference text and a possible way out for the study of Southern literature today.Barry Hannah(1942-2010)is a pioneer in the postmodern turn of American Southern literature and is considered by academics to be the leader who has brought Southern literature into postmodernism.Critics have called him,along with Harry Crews and Cormac Mc Carthy,the three “bad boys” of contemporary Southern literature.Hannah’s work shows an anti-traditional Southern posture.Hannah explores the Southern traditional motifs in an “offbeat” way,and continues to subvert people’s cognition of the South,bringing a different kind of vitality to the Southern literary world,and thus has won numerous awards,including the William Faulkner Prize,Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters,Guggenheim Fellowship,etc.,and nominated for Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.Therefore,to study the postmodern turn of the American South,Hannah’s works cannot be bypassed.Hannah’s works are undoubtedly a literary model for interpreting the postmodern turn in the South.The topic of the postmodern turn in Hannah’s works has always been the focus of academic circles.Scholars generally adopt a static perspective to focus on specific works to discuss Hannah’s subversive postmodernist creation techniques and rarely adopt a dynamic perspective to systematically interpret the postmodern turn in his works.Researchers have mainly focused on Hannah’s exploration of two Southern literary motifs,which are history and place,and have lacked attention to the motifs of religion and family.Studies of historical topics have failed to recognize Hannah’s thorough exposition of macro-historical fictionality.Most of the studies on the theme of place have only considered Hannah’s attempt to move away from the South,without realizing Hannah’s multifaceted exploration of the reasons for the dissipation of the place complex.This dissertation argues that Hannah’s creation concept is more in line with Linda Hutcheon’s sense of critical revisiting.While criticizing the contemporary social problems in the South,he digs into the roots of the problems that once existed in Southern social life and exposes the obscured truth.This upstream “off-cover”approach shows that Hannah is both a Sober-minded man and a lonely warrior of the times.His works play an important role in understanding today’s Southern social problems.Nowadays,people should pay attention to the possible paths that Hannah offers to reveal the truth,to rethink and understand the study of Southern literature.Based on this,this dissertation selects four aspects from the Southern classic motifs in Hannah’s works,namely,history,place,religion and family,and combines them with Linda Hutcheon’s postmodernism theory and Baudrillard’s consumerism theory,with the reference to the “Southern Renaissance” and previous Southern literature,selects the text of Hannah which related to the Southern motifs,and systematically explores the Southern postmodern turn in Hannah’s works from a dynamic perspective.The main body of this dissertation consists of four chapters.The first chapter explores Hannah’s exposure to the fictionality of the Southern macro history.Firstly,the dissertation takes Hannah’s war narratives in Ray and Airships as an entry point to discuss Hannah’s path of deconstructing Southern macro history.And by analyzing the conflict of interpretation between the Southern small historical narrative and the grand historical narrative in Bats Out of Hell,this dissertation deals with Hannah’s exposure to the macro-historical fictionality from the side.Secondly,the dissertation starts from the grand historical narrative of the South,and explores the different historical cognitions between the peers and inter-generation in High Lonesome under the burden of historical memory,including two postmodern historical perspectives turns.Hannah presents two polarized historical attitudes in his work,including extreme fascination and total abandonment,and gives experimental consequences.The behavior of being extremely obsessed with history actually exacerbates the problem of individual inconsistency,and the behavior of completely abandoning history will lead to the superficialization of individual thinking.Hannah’s work presents the complexity and contradiction of historical memory to Southerners in the postmodern turn,which provides a reference text for interpreting contemporary Southern history.The second chapter explores the trend of dissipation of the place complex in Hannah’s works.First,based on the text of Captain Maximus,this dissertation analyzes the phenomenon of Southerners’ disgust and alienation from the South in the post-Southern turn and the reasons for it.Second,combined with Baudrillard’s theory of consumerism,it analyzes the reasons for the disappearance of local characteristics in Yonder Stands Your Orphan,and the impact of the nostalgia industry,which mainly sells places,on Southerners’ local sentiments.In the postmodern turn,the burden of history has led to the fact that the South is no longer the “haunted”homeland of contemporary Southerners,but rather,Southerners gradually became disgusted with the South and even fled it.Under the influence of consumerism,places are gradually homogenized.Although consumerism has brought the distinctive South back into people’s view,this commercialized South is the simulacra of the traditional South,and after consumption is completed,the South ends its mission at the place level like a used commodity,thus,people inevitably develop a sense of nihility about the place.From disgust to alienation and then to nihility,Hannah reproduces the changes in Southerners’ feelings toward the place in the postmodern turn,providing a multi-level perspective and textual basis for understanding Southerners’ sense of place in the postmodern turn.The third chapter analyzes the social phenomenon of the decline of religious belief in Hannah’s works.On the one hand,starting from the internal cause of religion,this dissertation discusses the decline of religious morality and the loss of credibility in the text Ray.On the other hand,starting from the external cause of the process of commercialization,based on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism,money fetishism,and capital fetishism,and Baudrillard’s symbol fetishism,this dissertation analyzes the tendency of the gradual replacement of religious belief by the materialistic belief that appears in High Lonesome.As Southern society enters the postmodern period,religious beliefs diverge from the social ideology under consumerism and coupled with the internal problems of religious organizations,people are less dependent on religious beliefs than before.The prevalent materialistic beliefs have gradually become a substitute for religious beliefs to some extent.However,when subject consciousness is replaced with the object and occupied by the object,Southerners also fell into a new spiritual crisis.Hannah’s exploration of the crisis of religious belief in the postmodern turn is a forward-looking attempt to provide a new dimension of interpretation for understanding the change of religious belief in the contemporary South.The fourth chapter discusses the disintegration tendency of Southern families in Hannah’s works in the postmodern turn.The dissertation discusses the trend of the postmodern turn family from two aspects: the parent-child relationship with blood kinship as the bond and the husband-wife relationship with marriage as the bond.Taking the question of “where was the father” in Bats Out of Hell as an entry point,the dissertation explores the changes in the relationship between parents and children in the South.Based on Christopher Rasch’s narcissism theory,this paper analyzes the marriage problems in Ray.With the process of industrialization,the traditional Southern manorial economy model gradually disappears,and at the same time,the original family life model in the South gradually turned into the small family model.In the postmodern turn,the absence of the father in Southern family life has led to a series of parent-child problems,such as authoritative parenting and spoiled love,in which the blood relationship gradually becomes distorted.The combination of consumerism and extreme individualism has given rise to “narcissism”.The closed and unstable nature of narcissistic individuals has led to the splitting of marital relationships,and indifferent wives and cheating husbands becoming the main issues of postmodern marital life.With the distortion of blood kinship and the breakdown of marital relationships,the Southern family gradually disintegrates.Hannah presents the problems of Southern families in the postmodern turn in a fragmented way.Although his narrative is scattered,it is extensive and subtle.And these family problems presented by Hannah are worthy of deep reflection even today.On the whole,the South in Hannah’s works presents the characteristics of pluralism,complexity and contradiction in the postmodern turn.In this dissertation,Hannah’s discussion of these four topics is relatively “negative”,because Hannah uses the postmodernist “problematizing” writing strategy,focusing on the old and new problems of Southern society.The fictional macro history raises the problem of the memory burden of the Southerners;Under the influence of consumerism,the sense of place gradually becomes nihilistic;After the replacement of religious belief by materialistic belief,a new spiritual crisis occurred in Southerners;Under the influence of narcissism,Southern families heading for disintegration,etc.Hannah connects these issues horizontally and vertically from the perspective of peers and generations,and lifts up the “shady deal” that the Southern society once deliberately concealed.Although Hannah does not directly answer the social problems in the South,he does thoroughly “problematize” various phenomena of social life in the South,tries to give the direction of possible differentiation of these social problems,and makes multifaceted attempts to explore the possible outcomes.Hannah’s practice of questioning the truth of the South itself is conducive to people’s rethinking of the South,deepening their understanding of all aspects of Southern society,and bringing people closer to the truth of Southern society,which undoubtedly provides a new perspective for the study of Southern literature,and even a new dimension for the interpretation of American literature. |
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