Kudos to the University of Georgia Press for this recent reprint of Jay Watson’s Forensic Fictions, which has become something of a classic among law-and-literature scholars.  A pioneering project whose methodology later theorists have mimicked and revised, Forensic Fictions stands as the first critical work to interrogate the lawyer figure in Faulkner’s oeuvre.

Watson submits that law is vast and multidimensional, “at once a deeply normative cultural system, a vehicle of ideology (in its constructive and destructive manifestations), a force of social stability and control, an entrenched and often blindly self-interested institution, and not least of all a human vocation, a form of practice that in some instances achieves the status of a calling.”  In Faulkner’s fiction, law helps to highlight the complexity, sometimes liberating and sometimes disorienting, of the “everyday” aspects of Southern culture, institutions, and traditions.  Law is more than bills, statutes, judge-made opinions, codes, and the like.  Law isn’t a monolithic animal but a multiplicity of people and institutions; a product of self-serving performances by lawyers, judges, and politicians; and an accumulation of arguments couched in topoi of guilt and innocence, right and wrong, justice and equality.  Law is, simply put, a network of human relations and a collection of stories.  (more…)

The New York Times and the Oxford Eagle are reporting that Barry Hannah passed away on March 1.  SLR always liked this quote of his, about the term “southern writer:”

No really good writer could be merely Southern. A fiction writer isn’t provincial, ever. He should be sending back news from the front, news somebody else might not know about and it should be interesting and entertaining.

In an interview with SLR, another talented writer, Cynthia Shearer, described Hannah’s role in her evolution as a writer:

For a lot of years I feared my writing and the reactions it produced in people.  So I’m one of those people who tried to outrun it for a while and then realized in my thirties I’d be a saner person if I just submitted to it. I took Barry Hannah’s fiction course at the end of grad school to try to recover the old wonder at the power of words, and he pretty much started treating me like a writer, talking to me like I was writer, and prodded me to keep going.

Check out our previous profile of Barry Hannah.  Starting today is Oxford’s Conference on the Book, which this year is dedicated to Barry Hannah.

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Well butter my buns and call me a biscuit because the folks at the Oxford American have done it again! Each year this literary quarterly, proudly published by the University of Central Arkansas, releases a Southern music issue. This year the editors have introduced a new theme—The Southern State Series—because, according to founding editor Marc Smirnoff (no relation to the vodka distillery so far as I know), “We now expect, if not demand, surprises.” Fittingly for a publication out of Conway, Arkansas, the first of these pleasant surprises pays homage to Arkansas natives.
The issue offers not only the printed prose of several talented writers but also a double-disc demo of foot-tappin’-fanny-shakin’-honky-tonkin’ soul and sound. Bursting with improbable yet impeccable rhythms, refreshingly low-brow lyrics, twang, strings, and ol’-timey things, the CDs feature artists like Sonny Burgess, Billy Lee Riley, Larry Donn, Little Beaver, Maxine Brown, Sleepy LaBeef, and other notables among not-so-notables. One CD spotlights local artists (Arkansas Masters); the other, an eclectic, hand-picked mix of musicians from various Southern regions (Southern Masters).
Some of the selections will make you unbutton your shirt, loosen your belt, and flail your body from side to side. Some, though, will tug at your heartstrings. (I cried twice while listening to Southern Masters, but I’m a bit of a sap.) No one genre dominates this mélange of gospel, rock, bluegrass, and blues. Whether wailing about home-sweet-home, prison melancholy, lonesome highways, lost love or love made, these artists are sure to connect. (more…)