Abstract
The American South has remained its exceptional isolationist stance since the defeat of the Civil War. The Old South, full of rural backwaters, is a place not affected by the time-space compression of neoliberal economy, which marginalizes the South even further. Gael Sweeny thinks, the white underclass people in the Old South turn their bodies into a grotesque spectacle to resist the hegemonic America by transgressing the Christian boundary between the sacred/profane. In Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood” (1952), religious solemnity is ridiculed through human deformity: “Wise Blood” metaphorizes the human futility to outwit God, as the protagonist chooses to blind himself to be closer to God. In “True Blood,” adapted from Charlaine Harris’ “Dead Until Dark” (2001), the grotesque bodies of vampires are both the relics/remnants of the Civil War and the modern sex commodities survived by Japanese synthetic blood within the global trade. From “Wise Blood” to “True Blood,” the underclass/marginalized figures represent their transabled/deformed flesh as the grotesque to keep their sense of place, impervious to the discourse of globalization. As Southern Gothic fictions receive growing popularity all around the world, culture, preserved in a state of spatial immobility, is all they’re left to trade within the global market.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
"Space of Resistance", " Grotesque Body", " White Underclass", " Southern Gothic", " Flannery O’Connor", " Wise Blood", " True Blood", " Anti-globalization"
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