Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
Crime, Class, and Trash: The Politics of Transgression and Subsistence in Contemporary Appalachian Fiction
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
This paper compares the literary treatment of two hunting incidents in contemporary Appalachian novels. In Ron Rash’s Serena, a feigned hunting “accident” fails to bring criminal charges because the perpetrator is an elite lumber baron, while in David Joy’s The Line That Held Us, an honest hunting accident precipitates a whole string of violent incidents and law enforcement involvement because of the “kinds” of folks involved in the initial accident. Drawing on the work of scholars such as David Roediger, Matthew Fry Jacobson, and Matt Wray in the fields of whiteness and working-class studies, I use these scenes to explore economic and class structures in parts of Appalachia and the ways certain class distinctions are deployed to reify denigrating markers of “trash” vis a vis respectability politics. Serena’s setting in the Depression-era Asheville vicinity and Joy’s novel’s setting in contemporary Jackson County, N.C., provides an opportunity for a transhistorical analysis of the continued legacy of extraction industries in the region as well.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Sara Taylor Boissonneau is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Fayetteville State University. Her research focuses on literary regionalism, Appalachian fiction, and constructions of race/ethnicity in U.S. literature. She lives in Fayetteville, N.C., with her husband, two children, and two ungrateful and humongous felines.
Crime, Class, and Trash: The Politics of Transgression and Subsistence in Contemporary Appalachian Fiction
This paper compares the literary treatment of two hunting incidents in contemporary Appalachian novels. In Ron Rash’s Serena, a feigned hunting “accident” fails to bring criminal charges because the perpetrator is an elite lumber baron, while in David Joy’s The Line That Held Us, an honest hunting accident precipitates a whole string of violent incidents and law enforcement involvement because of the “kinds” of folks involved in the initial accident. Drawing on the work of scholars such as David Roediger, Matthew Fry Jacobson, and Matt Wray in the fields of whiteness and working-class studies, I use these scenes to explore economic and class structures in parts of Appalachia and the ways certain class distinctions are deployed to reify denigrating markers of “trash” vis a vis respectability politics. Serena’s setting in the Depression-era Asheville vicinity and Joy’s novel’s setting in contemporary Jackson County, N.C., provides an opportunity for a transhistorical analysis of the continued legacy of extraction industries in the region as well.
