ALH Online Review, Series I 1

Tara Powell, The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (Baton

Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012). xi, 266 pages.
Reviewed by Veronica Makowsky, University of Connecticut
Tara Powells The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature evokes a
wide range of topics for consideration or reappraisal in southern literature,
history, intellectual history, and culture. The title promises a broader canvas,
however, than what the book delineates in depth. Powells primary concern is
the treatment of the figure of the intellectual in selected fiction and memoirs of
the second half of the twentieth century, by Flannery OConnor, Walker Percy,
Doris Betts, Tim McLaurin, Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, Randall Kenan, and Gail
Godwin. Aside from an evaluative history of intellectuals and scholarship in the
first chapter, Powell does not attempt to consider southern intellectuals
themselves (as opposed to their portrayal in fiction and memoir) throughout the
twentieth century, nor does she attempt an in-depth analysis of the figure of
intellectuals as portrayed in literary works in the first half of the twentieth
century. Nor does she provide comprehensive lists and treatments of those
intellectuals depicted within literary works in the latter half of the twentieth
century. Instead, through extensive literary and historical analysis of selected
works, Powell presents the ways eight significant, and, in some ways,
representative authors struggle to identify a delicate balance: how does one
value the life of the mind while keeping it in meaningful proportion to other
aspects of life, from the practical to the spiritual?
The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature continues the revision of
southern literary history that began in the final quarter of the twentieth century
with the entry of womens, African-American, ethnic, and working-class
literature into the canon as well as a broadening of that canon to include genres
beyond traditional belles lettres to autobiography, essays, film, television, and
popular culture. In the scholarship of southern literature, this expansion came to
fruition in 1998 with Michael Kreylings The Invention of Southern Literature which
challenged the white, male, and conservative southern canon established by the
Nashville Agrarians in the 1920s and 30s and which, through its handmaiden,
the New Criticism, reigned supreme in literary circles for decades. Powell
proceeds with expanding and revising that canon and posits that the agrarian
tradition combined in distinctive ways with the peculiar institution of slavery
and the southern literary tradition to promote the stereotype of southerners and
even southern literature being notably, even fiercely, anti-intellectual (1). This
stereotype, she argues, has persisted despite the revision of many other southern
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cultural stereotypes, owing to the willful participation of scholars, editors, and
writers who have shaped what the designation southern has come to mean in
both the local and national imaginations(1). She thus joins scholars such as
Michael OBrien and Drew Gilpin Faust in challenging the claustrophobiainducing intensity with which the ostensible characteristics of the historical
South have mirrored the South depicted in the Fugitive-Agrarian-New Critical
canon of southern literature, and vice versa (11).
Powells contribution to the revisionist view of southern literature and culture is
her discovery and definition of three tropes of the intellectual from the late
eighteenth century through the first half of the twentieth and her exploration of
how and why these tropes are modified in the latter half of the twentieth
century. These three tropes comprise the responses of southern intellectuals to a
climate that is much worse than H. L. Menckens Sahara of the Bozarts: rather
than a desert or vacancy, the South is filled with active hostility toward matters
of the mind with which the intellectual must cope, but sometimes cannot. One
coping strategy is the masked intellectual, like William Byrd or William
Alexander Percy, whose ostensible vocation is that of planter or lawyer, for
example, and whose pursuit of intellectual matters is a hobby and refreshment.
While the masked intellectual can remain in the South, the exile cannot
function in its repressive atmosphere and departs, a tradition that Poe initiates.
Dysfunctional intellectuals are not only mocked as useless bumblers, but are
often cast as psychologically maimed, sometimes to the extent that they commit
suicide, such as Faulkners fictive Quentin Compson or the quite real intellectual
W. J. Cash after confronting the dispiritingly violent Mind of the South in his 1941
intellectual history.
Through her extensive literary analysis of selected works by eight writers after
1950, Powell explores how they modify the tropes of the masked, exiled, and
dysfunctional intellectual and pursue viable alternatives that place the intellect in
better proportion with other aspects of life and identity. For example, Powell
does not attempt to cover all of Walker Percys novels but focuses on The Last
Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1971), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) to
illustrate how Percy uses both Catholicism and existentialism to balance sciences
contradictory simultaneous tendencies toward excessive abstraction, what Percy
termed angelism, or obsessive materialism, or, for Percy, bestialism. Powell
develops a taxonomy for the characters Flannery OConnor called her
interleckchuls whose lack of proper proportion is privileging the intellect at
the expense of the total spirit (29). In an interesting, expansive intellectual
gambit, Powell moves the argument out of the library and academy by

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suggesting that, In the literary worlds of Betts and McLaurin, encounters with
other people and nature are touchstones revealing the limitations of book
learning, as well as exclusively mental engagement with the world and our own
identities. At the same time, these authors affirm the value of book learning
when properly applied to real life; indeed, intellectual life can turn into real life
(22). In contrast, Godwin, according to Powell, suggests that identity is available
to us in the resources of the academy, as much or perhaps more than anywhere
else (179), a direct contradiction of the tenets of southern anti-intellectualism.
Powells most original contributions come in two chapters that concern writers
who did not come from the privileged upper-class backgrounds that the Fugitive
Agrarians believed defined the best and only South. In Dislocated Academics
and the New South Writer of Ideas, she analyzes the effects that the
establishment of creative writing programs and creative writers within colleges
and universities had on the identities of writers as southerners and intellectuals.
While the relatively privileged Percy, OConnor, and Godwin were educated
within the academy and interacted with it in various ways throughout their
careers, their day jobs were not professorial. McLaurin and Betts, in contrast,
came from working-class backgrounds but made their careers at the University
of North Carolina (Chapel Hill). Powell examines the ways Betts and McLaurin
found their marginal positions as creative writers within a department that
emphasized literary criticism and scholarship both fruitful and frustrating since
they were doubly marginalized: their positions as academics distanced them
from their less educated families and communities yet provided them with the
tools and perspective to write about them.
In Intellectual Labor and Race Consciousness in Southern Fiction and Memoir,
Powell shows how African-American writers were recently welcomed into the
academy and could receive and give the educations so highly prized and so often
denied during slavery and its aftermath. Yet here, as in the chapter on workingclass writers, Powell proves that not only have the times changed, but so have
the aspirations of formerly excluded groups. In novels by Ernest Gaines, Alice
Walker, and Randall Kenan, she argues, contemporary southern AfricanAmerican writers present a new problem: how to rewrite the southern African
American literary narrative in a world where self-abnegation in the face of
community needs seems more and more like an out-of-date version of the story,
limiting their abilities to write their best lives (139).
The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature is a highly valuable
addition to southern literary studies and intellectual history not despite, but

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perhaps because it cannot deliver on the sweeping promises of its title. Powells
astute, evocative range and her groupings of representative authors and fine
literary exegeses suggest myriad topics and writers for further study, not just of
the literary past, but contemporary writing, particularly now that the twenty-first
century is well on its way. Has southern anti-intellectualism become one with
American anti-intellectualism with the ubiquity of mass media and the Internet?
What about the intellectual aspirations of ethnic groups new to the South? In an
era of increasingly online learning, will southern colleges and universities still
exist in a form that expresses regional identity in terms of intellectual aspirations
as well as intellectually antithetical athletics? Although these questions indicate
a need to examine the intellectual in new contexts, there is a certain timelessness
to the choice, as defined by Tara Powells parents when she was about to start
college: gainful employment or beautify my mind (ix).