I Don't Hate the South Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South

by Baker, Houston A.

• ISBN13: 9780195326550
• ISBN10: 0195326555
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-08-06
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Taking its title from the famous denial spoken by Faulkner's narrator in Absalom, Absalom! Baker skillfully weaves a narrative which takes the reader through his own family dramas, academic and personal travels, and remarkable literary encounters. As a young academic Baker enters into the complex world of Faulkner with scholarly intentions; however, the immediacy of family, race, and southern reglon in Faulkner's world leads Baker to a more personal, but also paradoxically more global, meditation. The genealogical, historical, and political landscapes of the South serve as a rich resource for a unique style of critical memoir, from which emerges a Global South reimagined for the twenty-first century. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Houston A. Baker, Jr. is a native of Louisville, Kentucky. Currently Distinguished University Professor of English as Vanderbilt University, he has taught at Yale, the Universities of Virginia and Pennsylvania, and Duke. His books include Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism, Re-Reading Booker T., Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing and Black Fathers and Sons in America, and Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. xiii
On the Distinction of "Jr.": Geographies of My Father Name	p. 3
Libraries of Consciousness: Public Reading and American Identity	p. 23
A Book of Southern Distinction: The Souls of Black Folk at 100	p. 33
Still Crazy after All These Years: A Yale Black Studies Story	p. 53
The Poetry of Impulse: Black Words on Southern Green	p. 67
Modernity and the Transatlantic Rupture: Sugar and the New South	p. 81
Traveling with Faulkner: A Tale of Myth, Contemporaneity, and Southern Letters	p. 97
"If you see Robert Penn Warren, ask him: "Who does speak for the Negro?" Reflections on Monk, Black Writing, and Percival Everett's Erasure	p. 121
Failed Prophet and Falling Stock: Why Ralph Ellison Was Never Avant-Garde	p. 151
The Catch: A Meditation on Family, Mental Illness, and My Father	p. 165
Conclusion: Even God Believes in "No Guarantees"	p. 185
Suggestions for Further Reading	p. 193
Acknowledgments	p. 197
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.