Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
“Far-Reaching Plow Lines: Jesse Stuart’s Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow”
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Jesse Stuart’s characterization as a “regional” writer does him both an honor and a disservice. To praise his immortalization of W-Hollow and Greenup, Kentucky, simultaneously undercuts Stuart’s connections to national and global literary traditions. Recognizing that the “regional” label functions, at best, as a kind of back-handed compliment—to say nothing of those who deploy the word “regional” as a pejorative to deliberately strand an author’s work outside the established canon—this paper approaches Stuart’s Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow as a regional work with extra-regional implications. On the one hand, the volume dutifully attends to the local particularities of a mountain farmer’s work and surroundings, throughout the seasons. Stuart’s voice rings with the authenticity of his place. On the other hand, Stuart uses the volume to enter multiple conversations. He positions himself at the end of a long tradition of plow poetry as Robert Burns’s and Virgil’s successor. Stuart also signaled his rejection of the (now canonical) poetry of Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot. With each of these cases of interxtuality, Stuart’s MwaB-TP stands firmly in place but still reaches out well beyond his region: to embrace the Scottish Highlands and first-century BCE Rome, as well as to reject the Modernist aesthetics of Stevens and Eliot. Stuart’s work, then, anticipates our contemporary challenge in Appalachian Studies: his poetry models one way to value our culture and place without excluding “outsiders” or ignoring broader (global) realities.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Ethan is an ecocritic who is in his first year as Assistant Professor of English at Mars Hill University where he teaches American and Appalachian Literature, as well as composition.
“Far-Reaching Plow Lines: Jesse Stuart’s Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow”
Jesse Stuart’s characterization as a “regional” writer does him both an honor and a disservice. To praise his immortalization of W-Hollow and Greenup, Kentucky, simultaneously undercuts Stuart’s connections to national and global literary traditions. Recognizing that the “regional” label functions, at best, as a kind of back-handed compliment—to say nothing of those who deploy the word “regional” as a pejorative to deliberately strand an author’s work outside the established canon—this paper approaches Stuart’s Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow as a regional work with extra-regional implications. On the one hand, the volume dutifully attends to the local particularities of a mountain farmer’s work and surroundings, throughout the seasons. Stuart’s voice rings with the authenticity of his place. On the other hand, Stuart uses the volume to enter multiple conversations. He positions himself at the end of a long tradition of plow poetry as Robert Burns’s and Virgil’s successor. Stuart also signaled his rejection of the (now canonical) poetry of Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot. With each of these cases of interxtuality, Stuart’s MwaB-TP stands firmly in place but still reaches out well beyond his region: to embrace the Scottish Highlands and first-century BCE Rome, as well as to reject the Modernist aesthetics of Stevens and Eliot. Stuart’s work, then, anticipates our contemporary challenge in Appalachian Studies: his poetry models one way to value our culture and place without excluding “outsiders” or ignoring broader (global) realities.
