[DOWNLOAD] "Dixie and the Dictators (Critical Essay)" by Modern Age # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Dixie and the Dictators (Critical Essay)
- Author : Modern Age
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,Reference,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 54 KB
Description
Every serious student of the modern South and its literature will recognize the author of this study as a scholar and critic of uncommon gifts and enviable accomplishments. Professor Brinkmeyer can read closely when argument calls for it, penetrating beneath the surface of imagery and rhetoric in new and suggestive ways, and at the same time few of his peers exhibit so inclusive a command of the twentieth-century Southern canon and the secondary material--historical, cultural, and critical--that best enhances our reading of it. The Fourth Ghost represents his thinking and writing at its highest level and will likely take Southern studies in new and quite promising directions. Its subject is a charged one to be sure, and Brinkrneyer's analysis is "historicized" to varying degrees, but his enabling assumptions have been appropriated, assimilated, and applied in concrete, ultimately humane, fashion. Although the author seems moved on occasion to flash his progressive bona fides, he is for the most part commendably even-handed and largely (though not entirely) free of the sanctimony too many of his fellows display as a matter of habit. His style is direct and idiomatic, at times conversational, and the reader stands to profit much from this author's prodigious powers as a researcher, even when he remains dubious of a given reading or conclusion. I found myself in hearty dissent when it came to a number of the author's more sweeping assertions. Brinkmeyer does ride his thesis hard, but one need hardly agree with his less-than-modest suggestion that the writers he considers are "perhaps best read" in the light of their engagement with the stark facts of European fascism to recognize the importance and lasting value of this study. As Brinkmeyer demonstrates in his Introduction, the South, with its regional insularity, valorizing of tradition, and preoccupation with race, has been (and, one might add, continues to be) particularly susceptible to a tarring with the fascist brush. No group of Southern intellectuals were assaulted more vigorously in that regard than the Agrarians. Thus Brinkmeyer devotes his first chapter to an account of their reaction to such indictments and their counter-insistence that it was not Agrarian subsidiarity, but the industrialized modern state (Donald Davidson's "Leviathan") that posed the real totalitarian threat. Brink-meyer lays out the unflattering history of the Agrarian alliance with the self-proclaimed fascist Seward Collins (a Yankee patrician), but he balances this discussion with an awareness of how the New Critical aesthetic implicit in Agrarian social theory privileged a democratic multiplicity of contending voices and viewpoints (tensions and ironies) over the univocal demands of propaganda art. His nuanced and sensitive reading of Allen Tate's wartime poetry brings an unexpected and valuable dimension into play. Still, one wishes he had pursued the implications of the Pound-Bollingen controversy a bit more fully. The issues surrounding that impassioned affair remain vexing today, and it is worth noting that not only Tate but Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Penn Warren (each of whom warrants a chapter in The Fourth Ghost) were members of the jury that awarded Pound the prize, a fact that might have been pursued to advantage.