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Bryan Giemza challenges the myth of the solitary genius, both in
scientific and humanistic endeavors, and demonstrates how Cormac
McCarthy is the exceptional figure whose work allows and encourages
us to interrogate the marriage of the sciences and humanities.
Drawing from previously unsurfaced archival connections as well as
a range of primary sources and interview subjects, including those
close to McCarthy, Giemza places McCarthy's work within
contemporary scientific discourse and literary criticism. Timely
and innovative in both content and structure, the volume includes a
biographical examination of the writer's love of science and the
path that led him to the Santa Fe Institute and offers a rare look
behind its closed doors. The book probes the STEM subjects - with
chapters focused on technology, engineering, and math - within and
throughout McCarthy's fictional universe and biography. The final
chapter explores McCarthy's friendship with Guy Davenport and their
shared interest in creating a unified aesthetic theory alongside
McCarthy's essays and most recent literary projects, The Passenger
and Stella Maris. In arguing that science and art are connected by
aesthetics, Giemza confirms the profound truth of McCarthy's
unwavering belief that "There's a beauty to science" and a language
of human understanding that transcends words.
John Poch's newly curated collection, Gracious: Poems of the 21st
Century South, spotlights both emerging and notable voices from
this poetry-rich region. This book promises to be the best and most
influential anthology of Southern poetry published in over thirty
years. Gracious steers away from stereotypical
mockingbird-and-magnolia verse and instead amplifies a variety of
lyric voices covering a wide breadth of Southern experience. Bryan
Giemza's timely introduction situates the anthology among the
current discourse in Southern studies. Gracious features the work
of some of our best-known poets alongside those who have just
published their first books. In all, there are eighty-four poets
included whose work moves both the heart and the intellect.
Gracious is, in the end, a new poetic geography, a book that
strives to define Southern poetry for a generation to come. It is a
book intended not only for the classroom; it aims to capture the
imaginations of readers of all ages and backgrounds.
A Depression-era comic masterpiece, E. P. O'Donnell's The Great Big
Doorstep centers on the Crochets, a Cajun family who live in a
ramshackle house between the levee and the Mississippi River. The
Crochets dream of one day owning a stately plantation befitting the
magnificent cypress doorstep they have salvaged from the river and
proudly display outside their humble home. The memorable characters
in this novel have their own concerns: the patriarch, Commodo, is
full of wild bravado as he fluctuates between scheming, laboring,
and malingering; his wife reigns as the queen of retort, though
toughened by years of making do and doing without. The Crochet
children also cope with personal struggles: Topal, twenty,
restless, and moody, and recently dumped by her fiancA (c); Arthur,
eighteen, attempts to strike out on his own while dodging the
coddling of his mother and the fury of his father; Evvie, almost
fifteen, plans to join a religious order after renouncing a lover;
and twins Gussie and Paul, and baby T. J., provide an ongoing
chorus of laughter and tears. The Great Big Doorstep has remained a
literary and cultural classic since its publication in 1941. In an
1979 afterword, Eudora Welty praises O'Donnell's comic genius,
citing his ""supreme gift"" for dialogue, while Bryan Giemza's
introduction underscores the work's place in the tradition of comic
Southern novels.
In this expansive study, Bryan Giemza recovers a neglected
subculture and retrieves a missing chapter of Irish Catholic
heritage by canvassing the literature of American Irish writers
from the U.S. South. Giemza offers a defining new view of Irish
American authors and their interrelationships within both
transatlantic and ethnic regional contexts. From the first Irish
American novel, published in Winchester, Virginia, in 1817, Giemza
investigates a cast of nineteenth-century writers contending with
the turbulence of their time, writers influenced by both American
and Irish revolutions. Additionally, he considers dramatists and
propagandists of the Civil War and Lost Cause memoirists who
emerged in its wake. Some familiar names reemerge in an Irish
context, including Joel Chandler Harris, Lafcadio Hearn, and Kate
(O'Flaherty) Chopin. Giemza also examines the works of
twentieth-century southern Irish writers, such as Margaret
Mitchell, John Kennedy Toole, Flannery O'Connor, Pat Conroy, Anne
Rice, Valerie Sayers, and Cormac McCarthy. For each author, Giemza
traces the influences of Catholicism as it shaped both faith and
ethnic identity, pointing to shared sensibilities and
contradictions. Flannery O'Connor, for example, resisted
identification as an Irish American, while Cormac McCarthy,
described by some as ""anti-Catholic,"" continues a dialogue with
the Church from which he distanced himself. Giemza draws on many
never-before-seen documents, including authorized material from the
correspondence of Cormac McCarthy, interviews from the Irish
community of Flannery O'Connor's native Savannah, Georgia, and
Giemza's own correspondence with writers such as Valerie Sayers and
Anne Rice. This lively literary history prompts a new understanding
of how the Irish in the region helped invent a regional mythos, an
enduring literature, and a national image.
In the 1930s, the U.S. government famously sent photographers
across the country to document on film the need for federal
assistance in rural areas. Dorothea Lange's well-known image
Migrant Mother came from this effort, along with thousands of other
photographs. Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, and Marion Post Wolcott
contributed to this compelling body of images. As primary
photographers for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the
state of Louisiana, the three took more than 2,600 photographs,
recording the modest homes, family gatherings, and working lives of
citizens across the state. In Images of Depression-Era Louisiana,
Bryan Giemza and Maria Hebert-Leiter curate more than 150 of those
photographs, offering a riveting collection that captures this
pivotal time in Louisiana's history. The book's stunning photo
gallery, with original captions, provides a moving visual tour of
Louisiana during a period of economic struggle and transition.
Organized by photographer, parish, and date, the revealing images
reflect an era when extreme poverty exacerbated the divide between
classes and races. Scenes of agricultural and rural communities-
families in clapboard houses, sugarcane cutters in the field, and
trappers navigating bayous- as well as cityscapes of New Orleans's
bustling markets, busy docks, and peaceful Jackson Square
demonstrate the scope of the photographers' work and the diversity
of conditions and occupations they found. Giemza and Hebert-Leiter
trace the genesis of the FSA Collection, examine its role in
promoting the documentary style of picture-taking, and explore the
motivations and methods of the collection's head, Roy E. Stryker.
They sketch the biographies, techniques, and perspectives of Shahn,
Lee, and Wolcott, explaining how the photographers operated in
Louisiana from their first experiences to their last days in the
state. Letters and other archival documents further illuminate the
three artists' impressions of Louisiana, its people, and its
traditions.
Much of American popular culture depicts the 1930s South either as
home to a population that was intellectually, morally, and
physically stunted, or as a romantic, sentimentalized haven
untouched by the nation's financial troubles. Though these images
stand as polar opposites, each casts the South as an exceptional
region that stood separate from American norms. Reassessing the
1930s South brings together historians, art critics, and literary
scholars to provide a new social and cultural history of the Great
Depression South that moves beyond common stereotypes of the
region. Essays by Steven Knepper, Anthony J. Stanonis, and Bryan A.
Giemza delve into the literary culture of the 1930s South and the
multiple ways authors such as Sterling Brown, Tennessee Williams,
and E. P. O'Donnell represented the region to outsiders. Lisa
Dorrill and Robert W. Haynes explore connections between artists
and the South in essays on New Deal murals and southern dramatists
on Broadway. Rejecting traditional views of southern resistance to
modernization, Douglas E. Thompson and Ted Atkinson survey the
cultural impacts of technological advancement and
industrialization. Emily Senefeld, Scott L. Matthews, Rebecca
Sharpless, and Melissa Walker compare public representations of the
South in the 1930s to the circumstances of everyday life. Finally,
Ella Howard, Nicholas Roland, and Robert Hunt Ferguson examine the
ways southern governments and activists shaped racial perceptions
and realities in Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee. Reassessing the
1930s South provides an interpretation that focuses on the region's
embrace of technological innovation, promotion of
government-sponsored programs of modernization, rejection of the
plantation legend of the late nineteenth century, and
experimentation with unionism and interracialism. Taken
collectively, these essays provide a better understanding of the
region's identity, both real and perceived, as well as how
southerners grappled with modernity during a decade of uncertainty
and economic hardship.
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