Leaving Tuscaloosa: Brad Vice’s Postsouthern Intertextuality

In September 2005, the University of Georgia Press published Brad Vice's collection of short stories, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, winner of the press's prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Shortly thereafter, a reader in Vice's hometown of Tuscaloosa, Alabama...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Southern quarterly 2020, Vol.57 (2), p.111-128
Main Author: Dischinger, Matthew
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
American literature
Authorship
Autobiographical literature
Autobiographies
Carmer, Carl (1893-1976)
Culture
DeLillo, Don
English literature
Fiction
Funerals
Intertextuality
Plagiarism
Short stories
Southern literature
Vice, Brad (1973- )
Writers
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:In September 2005, the University of Georgia Press published Brad Vice's collection of short stories, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, winner of the press's prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Shortly thereafter, a reader in Vice's hometown of Tuscaloosa, Alabama recognized similarities between one of Vice's stories and Carl Carmer's famed memoir, Stars Fell on Alabama (1934). Vice maintained that he wrote the collection in the spirit of contemporary historical speculative fiction, such as Don DeLillo's Libra (1988), which fictionalizes the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, and Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), which takes place in the off-stage world of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Understanding Vice's work with Carmer as an explicit act of intertextual sampling rather than an attempt to hide its indebtedness to Carmer's memoir opens up space to comprehend the fascinating work that Vice's fiction specifically and postsouthern fiction writ large can perform.
ISSN:0038-4496
2377-2050