This chapter considers William Faulkner’s role as a literary giant and cultural ambassador during the Cold War and how his canonization into both American and southern literature reveals the usefulness of southern identity and values to the diplomatic ambitions of America on the world stage. His canonization help establish connections between area studies, American studies, and southern studies. This role is explored through close reading of Intruder in the Dust (1948), and Faulkner’s prominence in Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and Robert Jacob’s Southern Renascence (1953), the first published collection of scholarship on southern literature. Both cast the racial problems in the South as moral ones that can be solved by an exceptional culture of honor and tradition, which in turn bolsters American democratic values and dismisses race as a serious social and political problem at a moment when the country attempts to exert hegemonic influence on the world stage.
The formalized study of southern literature in the mid-twentieth century is an example of scholars formalizing the study of modernist aesthetics in order to suppress leftist politics and sentiments in literature and art. This formalized, institutional study was initiated in a climate in which intellectuals were under societal pressure, created by the Cold War, to praise literary and artistic production representative of American values. This even in southern literary studies occurred roughly at the same time that the United States sought to extoll the virtues of America’s free, democratic society abroad. In this manner, southern studies and American studies become two sides of the same coin. Intellectuals and writers that promoted American exceptionalism dealt with the rising Civil Rights Movement and the nation’s complicated history with race and poverty by casting the issues as moral rather than political problems that were distinctly southern and could therefore be corrected by drawing on “exceptional” southern values, such as tradition and honor. The result of such maneuvering is that over the course of the twentieth century, “south” becomes more than a geographical identity. Ultimately, “south” becomes a socio-political and cultural identity associated with modern conservatism with no geographical boundaries. Rather than a country divided into south and north, the United States is divided in the twenty-first century into red and blue states. The result of using southern literature to present southern values as appropriate, moderate values for the whole nation during the Cold War is to associate these values with nationalism and conservatism today.
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