The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature by Tara Powell (review)

622 Mississippi Quarterly The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature, by Tara Powell. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012. 288pp. $42.50 cloth. TARA POWELL’S 2012CRITICAL WORK,THE INTELLECTUAL INTWENTIETHCentury Southern Literature, does something literary criticism should do—her project sparks intellectual curiosity and whets the reader’s desire to read and re-consider what literature has to teach us. While I thought I could write this review within a few weeks, while attending to other responsibilities, I found my work interrupted by frequent trips to the library. I was stopped in my tracks after reading Chapter Three, “The Dear Life of Walker Percy.” Although it had been over thirty years since I read Percy’s The Last Gentleman, I found myself questioning Powell’s reading of the “intellectual flummox” at the novel’s end. Could it be possible to argue that the ending offers the possibility that both Will and Sutter may be able to experience “humility and awe”? “Humility” and “awe” are not words I remember associating with these alienated intellectuals. Equally intrigued by Powell’s analysis of Randall Kenan, I found myself back in the stacks, devouring his memoirs and essays; at home, I hungrily re-read passages from the novels of Doris Betts, Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, and Gail Godwin. Powell is an intellectual who appears to be humbled and awed by the literature of the South, and she energetically immerses herself and her readers in a complicated, intellectual analysis of what the life of the mind means to late twentieth-century Southern writers who were “bequeathed” the trope of anti-intellectualism from their literary predecessors. Describing herself as a “reader, poet, scholar, and teacher,” Powell reminisces about the time she set off to college at UNC-Chapel Hill, hearing in her mind the fears of her parents that she would get caught up in a world of ideas, rather than find gainful employment. But perhaps she did both. Powell’s project seems heavily influenced by her experiences at Chapel Hill, by the writers and mentors she found and studied there, and by her own desire to interrogate her intellectual vocation. Beginning her analysis in the mid-1950s and reaching into the twenty-first century, Powell offers very close readings of works by eight authors: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Doris Betts, Tim McLaurin, Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, Randall Kenan, and Gail Godwin. The bulk of her analysis is heavily influenced by New Criticism, which makes it unlike most contemporary literary criticism. Although not keenly theoretical, Powell’s project is informed by her awareness that, as 623 Book Reviews Virginia Woolf asserts, “imaginative work . . . is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached, ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners” (41). In her relatively short work, Powell not only provides her readers with close readings and an infectious appreciation of the works of eight authors, but also with biographical insights into their lives and an investigation into the social, political, and educational history of the South. In her first chapter, Powell provides a critical overview of the trope of Southern anti-intellectualism and argues that until 1954, the Southern intellectual was largely represented in literature as masked, exiled, or dysfunctional. She then begins her analysis of the ways eight authors who “came into their own after World War II” struggled with, responded to, or re-imagined this deeply ingrained trope in their literary works. As Powell reads O’Connor and Walker, she considers how their fervent belief in the mysteries of their faith, their disabilities, their uneasiness with academia, and their regional identities influenced their verydifferentportrayalsoftheintellectual.WhileO’Connorsatirizesher “interleckchul,” Percy takes him outside the academy and into a New South. Powell sets her readings of the works of Betts and McLaurin against the backdrop of the development of creative writing as an academic subject, the influence of New Criticism, and the conservatism of the Agrarians in order to interrogate the individual ways they work to bridge their regional and academic identities. In her chapter on African American writers, “Intellectual Labor and Race Consciousness inSouthernFictionandMemoir,”Powellforegroundsherinterpretation of the...