Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
Experimental Elegies: The Appalachian Memoir from Emma Bell Miles’s The Spirit of the Mountains to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
As rhetoricians have long noted, genre affords a theoretical and conceptual framework for knowledge production and knowledge distribution. At the most basic level, genre provides boundaries, allowing readers to see how the characteristics of one text dovetail with the typologies of others. If genre is the primary mode by which authors frame their textual productions, what do we do with a text that pushes the limits of the genre, producing an extreme—and experimental—version of itself? This paper considers two such extreme texts: Emma Bell Miles’s The Spirits of the Mountain (1905) and J.D. Vance’s recent Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis (2016), both of which can be viewed as exemplars of experimental Appalachian memoirs. Miles and Vance invoke multiple genres (from the short story, to the fable, to the confession narrative, among others) while offering aesthetic, political, and humanitarian explorations of Appalachia in light of their particular historical moment. Under the lens of both genre theory and autobiographical theory, I posit that through their experimental forms, both Miles and Vance complicate our understanding of the genre known as the memoir and, in doing so, compose their own extreme renditions of an Appalachian elegy.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Kathleen Crosby earned her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches coursework in literature, composition, and education. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Saint Andrews University.
Experimental Elegies: The Appalachian Memoir from Emma Bell Miles’s The Spirit of the Mountains to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy
As rhetoricians have long noted, genre affords a theoretical and conceptual framework for knowledge production and knowledge distribution. At the most basic level, genre provides boundaries, allowing readers to see how the characteristics of one text dovetail with the typologies of others. If genre is the primary mode by which authors frame their textual productions, what do we do with a text that pushes the limits of the genre, producing an extreme—and experimental—version of itself? This paper considers two such extreme texts: Emma Bell Miles’s The Spirits of the Mountain (1905) and J.D. Vance’s recent Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis (2016), both of which can be viewed as exemplars of experimental Appalachian memoirs. Miles and Vance invoke multiple genres (from the short story, to the fable, to the confession narrative, among others) while offering aesthetic, political, and humanitarian explorations of Appalachia in light of their particular historical moment. Under the lens of both genre theory and autobiographical theory, I posit that through their experimental forms, both Miles and Vance complicate our understanding of the genre known as the memoir and, in doing so, compose their own extreme renditions of an Appalachian elegy.
