Hellhound on His Trail: Faulknerian Blood-guilt and the Traumatized Form of Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle

Atkinson, Ted

doi:10.1353/slj.2011.0016

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Other work has attended to how literature has memorialized and aestheticized violent historical events: Harriet Pollack and Christopher Metress's edited collection Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination () takes a paramount moment in racial history as its focal point, exploring how Till's brutal murder has been rendered by writers such as William Bradford Huie, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Anne Moody, Nicolas Guillén, Aimé Césaire, Bebe Moore Campbell, and Lewis Nordan; Metress stresses how Emmett Till's murder functions as what Ron Eyerman in his work on slavery and African American identity calls a “cultural trauma” or “tear in the social fabric” (Metress 17). The aesthetic impact of Till's traumatic murder has also been explored by Ted Atkinson in “Hellhound on His Trail: Faulknerian Blood‐guilt and the Traumatized Form of Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle ” (); here, Atkinson argues that Nordan's surreal, defamiliarized style reflects “the limiting and haunting historical and cultural narratives that the author is compelled to rehearse,” including, but not limited to, negotiating the long shadow of Faulkner's influence on what it means to tell about the South. Other key historical traumas and their impact on southern literature have also been explored: David A. Davis (), for example, has examined Katherine Anne Porter's “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” and its rendering of the Influenza Pandemic of 1918; Daniel Y. Kim () has explored the impact of the Korean War in Susan Choi's The Foreign Student ; Julie Buckner Armstrong () has investigated the impact of Mary Turner's lynching on a range of literature, journalism, and artistic representation, including the “Kabnis” section of Jean Toomer's Cane and Angelina Weld Grimké's short story “Goldie”; and Lisa Hinrichsen () has detailed the influence of the Vietnam War in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country .…”

Section: Trauma and The Us Southmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trauma Studies and the Literature of the U.S. South

Hinrichsen

2013

Literature Compass

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The history of the U.S. South is one undeniably littered with traumatic acts, laws, and legitimized behaviors: racially biased laws that relegated Blacks to the status of disposable bodies denied by White culture; the regulated, segregated spaces of Jim Crow; and brutal, repetitive acts of violence that include lynching, incest, rape, and murder. This essay assesses the role that trauma studies, as an interdisciplinary area of investigation that came to prominence in the early-to-mid-1990s, has played in assessing the ways that injury is troped, represented, and repeated in southern literature and its criticism. This essay first outlines the history of trauma as a theory, drawing attention to the fissures within the concept as it has developed over time, while also surveying the surge of works published under this rubric. The essay then assesses how trauma studies, with its attention to the nuances of testimony, the interlocked nature of personal and political traumas, and the importance of collective and cultural perspectives, has come to influence criticism on the literature of the U.S. South.Southern literature and its criticism have long recognized the roles that memory, trauma, and history play in the development of culture, but criticism about "the mind of the South" has historically been problematic: riddled by Oedipal anxieties and fascinations, much of this work has served to replay and reinforce the notion that, as Faulkner put it, "The past is never dead. It's not even past" (81). 1 Yet in the wake of postmodern and postcolonial studies, gender studies, and trauma and memory studies, southern studies has recently begun to reexamine its own historical construction, representation, and development, questioning notions of self-identity, history, and community, and complicating what it means to remember. Drawing on trauma studies, which bequeaths a theoretical framework and methodology to southern studies' key concepts of "memory" and "history," has been an increasingly popular move, especially within the theoretically inflected "New Southern Studies." 2 This essay briefly historicizes and surveys the rise of contemporary trauma theory, notes the impact that these theories have had on southern literary criticism, evaluates the role that depictions of injury play in the literature of the South, and assesses the usefulness of trauma theory for understanding events such as slavery, segregation, racism, and political violence. To historicize and contextualize trauma means recognizing the fissures within the concept and understanding the limitations of it as a descriptive term and organizing category. While the term "trauma" originally had a physical meaningit comes from the ancient Greek word for "wound" and its primary denotation is invasive bodily injuryin modernity, through the work of Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, Joseph Breuer, and Sigmund Freud, it accrued mental as well as physical meanings and came to refer to both individual and collective processes. As Judith Herman (1992) has noted, trauma has ...

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Section: Trauma and The Us Southmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trauma Studies and the Literature of the U.S. South

Hinrichsen

2013

Literature Compass

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Iconoclasms of Emmett Till and his killers in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle: A new generation of historiographic metafiction

Vayo

2018

Semiotica

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In this essay, I argue that the apparent historical inaccuracies contained within Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle (Nordan, Lewis. 2003 [1993]. Wolf Whistle. Chapel Hill: Algonquin) represent a systematic repeal of the controversial history surrounding the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. Nordan reconstitutes the principle characters to function as iconoclasms of the historical record. As iconoclasms, these representations undermine our culture’s accepted model of history, what Hayden White terms the “historical account” (White, Hayden. 1975. Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press: 30).

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Hellhound on His Trail: Faulknerian Blood-guilt and the Traumatized Form of Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle

Cited by 2 publications

References 8 publications

Trauma Studies and the Literature of the U.S. South

Trauma Studies and the Literature of the U.S. South

Iconoclasms of Emmett Till and his killers in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle: A new generation of historiographic metafiction

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