De-Located Yankees: David Sedaris and Growing Up Northern in the South, 1965–1983
Like such southern novels as William McLaurin's Winslow's Trumpet and Josephine Humphreys's Dreams of Sleep, Watson's story richly evokes the conflict of American regional identities that played out as the aftermath of the Civil Rights era coincided with the "Sun Belt"...
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| Published in: | Southern cultures 2018-06, Vol.24 (2), p.5-20 |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Like such southern novels as William McLaurin's Winslow's Trumpet and Josephine Humphreys's Dreams of Sleep, Watson's story richly evokes the conflict of American regional identities that played out as the aftermath of the Civil Rights era coincided with the "Sun Belt" real estate boom of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s.4 Critics have tended to see in the South's demographic changes in the later twentieth century the defeat and eclipse of a coherent southern identity by a featureless, ahistorical, suburban mall culture-a generic "America," what some have called the "No South."The northerners of "You Can't Kill the Rooster" reveal a profound discomfort with their own dislocation in the hands of capitalism-in terms the Nashville Agrarians of I'll Take My Stand would doubtless approve.9 At the same time, the images Sedaris places in the minds of his northern compatriots are derived entirely from the mass media, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s had taken a particular interest in kitschy depictions of rural southern stereotypes (Mountain Dew's "Willie the Hillbilly" advertisements; The Beverly Hillbillies; The Waltons; much of the career of Burt Reynolds).[...]from a southern Yankee point of view, both North and South are camp, and camp (in two senses, here) is inescapable.David Sedaris, When You are Engulfed in Flames (Boston: Little, Brown, 2008), copyright page; Gilbert Cruz, "10 Questions for David Sedaris," Time, July 5, 2008, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812072,00.html; Alex Heard, "This American Lie," New Republic, March 19, 2007, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/american-lie-midget-guitar-teacher-macys-elf-and-thetruth-about-david-sedaris; Kylie Cardell and Victoria Kuttainen, "The Ethics of Laughter: David Sedaris and Humour Memoir," Mosaic: a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 45, no. 3 (September 2012): 99-114; Kevin Kopelson, Sedaris (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 3, 11-15; Finding Your Roots, season 2, episode 9, "Ancient Roots," directed by Muriel Soenes, Josh Gleason, Phil Bertelsen, Jesse Sweet, Sabin Streeter, written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., featuring Tina Fey, David Sedaris, and George Stephanopoulos, aired November 18, 2014, on PBS; Heard, "This American Lie." |
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| ISSN: | 1068-8218 1534-1488 1534-1488 |