Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
Panel Title: "Rash Worlds: Rural, Urban, Nonhuman, and Beyond"
Session Abstract or Summary
Panel Overview: Since his dramatic appearance on the literary stage with his debut novel One Foot in Eden (2002), Ron Rash has continued a prolific outpouring of award-winning poetry and fiction. With its popular and scholarly appeal as well as its invaluable social critiques and celebrations, Rash’s work is increasingly relevant and important on both local and global levels, and thus it warrants ongoing academic attention. This panel features four original papers that offer a range of critical and theoretical approaches to examine important aspects of Rash’s work. Jimmy Dean Smith examines the relationship, in several of Rash’s characters, between shifting linguistics and displacement from the Appalachian region. Frédérique Spill explores how Rash recurrently utilizes the metaphor of barbed wire to comment on Appalachians’ connection to place. Randi Adams analyzes environmental disasters in conjunction with Appalachian culture and identity formation in Rash’s fiction. Lastly, Randall Wilhelm surveys Rash’s short stories and poetry to investigate Rash’s frequent evocation of animals to transfer affective energies between characters and to readers. Taken together, these papers encourage readers and critics alike to understand Appalachia in all its complexity, as Rash consistently provides portrayals of the region that reveal both the beauty of its cultures and landscapes as well as the social and environmental pathologies that it has and continues to face. Firmly rooted in the mountain South, Rash’s artistic vision weaves the truths of the human condition and the perils of the human heart in a poetic language that speaks deeply to us all.
Presentation #1 Title
“Solitude Like a Geographical Place: Some Disconnected People in Ron Rash’s Fiction,” Jimmy Dean Smith
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Abstract: This paper considers how geographical displacement leads to painful linguistic unlinking in several of Ron Rash’s fictions: “The Corpse Bird,” Saints at the River, “The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars,” The World Made Straight, and its relatively obscure precursor, “Time Zones.” Using the eco-philosopher Glen Albrecht’s terminology and theoretical frame, I approach these texts as less familiar but still noteworthy components of a theme extending throughout the Rash oeuvre (“Spring Fever,” Eureka Mill), that of exile and loneliness. An Appalachian childhood, writes Rash in “The Corpse Bird” and numerous poems, involves training in the semiotics of place, i.e., learning to “live life ‘by the signs’” of a highly expressive landscape. Under the tutelage of elder bloodkin, children learn not only English (and Appalachian English), but also the grammar and syntax of birds and spiders, of sun and moon. The present texts situate their protagonists in “inauthentic” places—an upper middle class sub-division outside Asheville, the Midlands of South Carolina—where the somatic and spiritual effects of nostalgia are illuminated and magnified by loss of eco-rhetorical certainties. Cut off from the signifiers of place—whether by alteration of the land (a major theme in Rash; cf. solastalgia [Albrecht]) or exile from it (a lesser but still significant, and relatively unexplored, theme in Rash, and the subject of this paper)—erstwhile mountain people face a crisis in their own singular hermeneutics, an aphasia affecting the Appalachian part of the brain.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Bio: Jimmy Dean Smith is a native of Upstate South Carolina. He has written about Ron Rash in North Carolina Literary Review and Summoning the Dead: Essay on Ron Rash (University of South Carolina Press, 2018). He has also recently published articles and book chapters on Flannery O’Connor, Frank X Walker, and Appalachia on reality TV. He is Professor of English at Union College in Barbourville, KY.
Presentation #2 Title
“‘One man’s tenuous hold on the earth’: The Metaphor of Barbed Wire in Ron Rash’s Writing,” Frédérique Spill
Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary
Abstract: Because of its unquestionable focus on a rather restricted area in the Appalachian mountains and because he is understandably stamped as a southern writer with, in keeping with the tradition, a particularly sharp sense for place, Ron Rash’s literary exploitation of his deeply rural region, as opposed to the nation and the wider world, is central to his critics’ examination of his writing. This paper proposes to take a closer look at one specific metaphor that is particularly evocative of Rash’s depiction of place: while barbed wire fences keep fragmenting his literary territory, cutting up the space inhabited by his characters, they also induce a singular poetics. In Rash’s writing, barbed wire designates humanity’s urge to draw boundaries at the same time as it exposes the precariousness of that urge. It, indeed, evokes a makeshift boundary that is likely to be interpreted as an invitation to transgression. Meanwhile, the repetition of the image throughout Rash’s writing, whether in prose or poetry, encapsulates his characteristic skill for turning a mundane object into a poetic trope. Starting with the metaphor of barbed wire, which, as suggested by the poem “Barbed Wire,” published in Rash’s 2002 collection Raising the Dead, captures “[o]ne man’s tenuous hold on the earth,” this paper will examine in detail the use Rash makes, both as a fiction writer and as a poet fluctuating between genres, of how the trope is associated with space. Indeed, erecting boundaries, passing limits, transgressing borders, and interrogating the very notion of mapping are recurrent figures of Rash’s writing. Their very recurrence throughout a literary world that is dominated by images, large and small, of the natural world is particularly revealing of the tension between humanity and nature that underlies most of Rash’s work; they shed light on how humanity has been trying to appropriate, and even tame, space across generations; they manifest his characters’ concern with leaving traces in the world they inhabit; they also delineate a space that may be more mutable than it first appears.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Bio: Frédérique Spill is Associate Professor-HDR of American literature; she teaches at the University of Picardy—Jules Verne in Amiens, France, where she also supervises the research group EA4295 CORPUS. She is the author of L’Idiotie dans l’œuvre de William Faulkner (Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne-Nouvelle, 2009). She contributed to Critical Insights: The Sound and the Fury (Salem Press, 2014), to Faulkner at Fifty: Tutors and Tyros (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014) and co-edited The Wagon Moves: New Essays on As I Lay Dying (L’Harmattan, 2018). For the past five years her research and publications have mainly been focusing on the work of novelist, short story writer and poet Ron Rash. She contributed to Conversations with Ron Rash (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) and to Summoning the Dead: Essays on Ron Rash (University of South Carolina Press, 2018). Her monograph The Radiance of Small Things in Ron Rash’s Writing will be published by the University of South Carolina Press in September 2019.
Presentation #3 Title
“Power and Powerlessness: Reactions to Environmental Destruction and Restriction in Ron Rash’s One Foot in Eden, Serena, and Above the Waterfall,” Randi Adams
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
Abstract: Throughout much of Ron Rash’s body of work, he links the fate of the characters to that of the environment and in doing so, asks the reader to reconsider humanity’s role within nature. Applying the eco-theoretical work of Lawrence Buell, among others, this essay explores the intertwined fates of the Southern Appalachian environment and the culture and identity of the people that inhabit this environment. Further, this essay seeks to analyze the reactions that Rash’s characters demonstrate when faced with the destruction and restriction of the land that they inhabit. The characters that populate Rash’s One Foot in Eden (2002), Serena (2008), and Above the Waterfall (2015) are situated on a spectrum of reaction when met with the restriction and destruction of their environment at the hands of various industries. This wide range of responses works to illustrate a more historically and culturally comprehensive representation of the ways in which Appalachian people respond to situations in which the power to control their fate is taken from them.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Bio: Randi Adams is currently finishing her Master’s in English at Western Carolina University. In May 2018, she presented her paper, “‘Like trying to live in a graveyard’: Uninhabitable Environments, Fatalism, and the Post-Apocalyptic Vision of the Poor in Ron Rash’s Serena” at the American Literature Association conference in San Francisco, California. Her current interests include Southern and Appalachian literature and history, especially in relation to social and economic class and the environment.
Presentation #4 Title
“Strange Beasts: Art, Animals and Affect in Ron Rash’s Short Fiction and Poetry,” Randall Wilhelm
Presentation #4 Abstract or Summary
Abstract: In his poem “The Wolves in the Asheville Zoo,” Ron Rash describes a primal encounter between a human spectator and the animals huddled in fog among the trees of their artificial habitat. However, these barriers only physically separate the two species; when one wolf “bares its throat,” the speaker is sent unraveling through time and space to the ancient forests of the Old World where “wolfpacks / vanished far back as fire drakes” but where the experiences still brim “denned in blood-memory” (ll. 4, 13-15). The movement is especially evocative and critically important to understanding how Rash shapes connections between human and nonhuman actors in an ongoing performance that moves between and within the folds of time, memory, and experience. Animals—and for my purposes certain birds and fish—people the pages of Rash’s short fiction and poetry with regularity and import. In some stories, animals perform as plot catalyst and moral testing ground, as in “Hard Times” where a young girl must steal eggs from her neighbors’ henhouse so she will not starve. In other stories, animals evoke the mysteries of existence and human loneliness, fear, absence, and death, as in “The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars.” Still other times, animals appear as art objects, as in “Burning Bright,” where a cloisonné tiger lighter shimmers with affective vibrancy between an aging widow and her young pyromaniac lover. Examining the role of animals, birds, and fish in Rash’s work, I plan to show how these “strange beasts” contribute to the construction of the narrative and as vehicles for the transfer of affective energies between characters and outward to readers as well.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #4
Bio: Randall Wilhelm is the editor of The Ron Rash Reader (University of South Carolina Press, 2014), co-editor, with Zackary Vernon, of Summoning the Dead: Essays on Ron Rash (University of South Carolina Press, 2018), and co-editor, with Jesse Graves, of Conversations with Robert Morgan (forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi, Fall 2019). He is associate professor of English at Anderson University.
“Solitude Like a Geographical Place: Some Disconnected People in Ron Rash’s Fiction,” Jimmy Dean Smith
Abstract: This paper considers how geographical displacement leads to painful linguistic unlinking in several of Ron Rash’s fictions: “The Corpse Bird,” Saints at the River, “The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars,” The World Made Straight, and its relatively obscure precursor, “Time Zones.” Using the eco-philosopher Glen Albrecht’s terminology and theoretical frame, I approach these texts as less familiar but still noteworthy components of a theme extending throughout the Rash oeuvre (“Spring Fever,” Eureka Mill), that of exile and loneliness. An Appalachian childhood, writes Rash in “The Corpse Bird” and numerous poems, involves training in the semiotics of place, i.e., learning to “live life ‘by the signs’” of a highly expressive landscape. Under the tutelage of elder bloodkin, children learn not only English (and Appalachian English), but also the grammar and syntax of birds and spiders, of sun and moon. The present texts situate their protagonists in “inauthentic” places—an upper middle class sub-division outside Asheville, the Midlands of South Carolina—where the somatic and spiritual effects of nostalgia are illuminated and magnified by loss of eco-rhetorical certainties. Cut off from the signifiers of place—whether by alteration of the land (a major theme in Rash; cf. solastalgia [Albrecht]) or exile from it (a lesser but still significant, and relatively unexplored, theme in Rash, and the subject of this paper)—erstwhile mountain people face a crisis in their own singular hermeneutics, an aphasia affecting the Appalachian part of the brain.
