The Extra 95
Sympathy for the liberal tradition makes a balanced treatment of the literature [of the southern renascence] impossible” (p. 595). This is a clear warning: the study of southern literature shall be reserved for the community of the faithful who believe in the South as icon above and beyond history and intellect, who eschew literary approaches through alien territory occupied by the tribes of Levi-Strauss and Freud, and who espouse a conservative intellectual tradition as far to the right as T.S. Eliot. If we were to heed this warning there would be on, fixed, academized southern literature, hostile to the new different, reserved for believers.
The problem with HSL, a problem that dissensus critical awareness illuminates, stems from problems inherent in definition, from over-investment in the unexamined tenets of the renascence, and from programmatic literary-historical amnesia that, by design or not, has overtaken the study of southern literature. The orthodox, consensus hold on southern literary study has done about as much good as it can. With the publication of HSL we can see that from now on that hold will restrict rather than nurture. We have nothing to lose by accepting the challenges of dissensus. Opening dialogue hurts no one. We have too much to lose if we do not: in the long run we risk the loss of our right to be heard at all in the discourse of American literature. Someone, in the not too distant future, might ask: “Who reads southern literary criticism?” and the answer would be: “Only the southernists.”