Listening to the Ghosts: The "New Southern Studies"

This essay is a response to Michael Kreyling's article analyzing the state of new southern studies. Kreyling argues that in many of the new texts, there is too much "calculated amnesia" and wants to see more awareness of past texts and criticism. My response agrees with Kreyling in this charge but suggests that the combining of new and old is a tricky business because you must determine which old you want to preserve and value. I suggest that the texts that place the mixing of old and new at the heart of their examinations are the most successful. The articles in the special issue of American Literature on the new southern studies do not negotiate that tricky combination of old and new. The Prentice-Hall anthology, The South in Perspective, includes a nice mix of canonical and non-canonical texts, but diverts attention by unnecessarily separating texts into "upper south" and "lower south" categories. I end with a discussion of Houston Baker's Turning South Again and Baker's description of being haunted by the southern past. I suggest that to avoid the problem Kreyling addresses of forgetting the past we should listen to the ghosts.