An Interview with Ron Rash

Ron Rash (born in Chester, South Carolina, in 1953) is the author of five novels, five collections of short stories and four collections of poems. He is currently completing his sixth novel, Above the Waterfall. He probably owes the international attention he now enjoys to the publication of Serena (the novel was a 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist), whose plot retraces the fate of a Lady Macbeth-like figure at the head of a timber industry in the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina at the..

Something Rich and Strange: Ron Rash on Short Story Writing – an Interview

In fall 2014, Ecco, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, released a selection of short stories by Ron Rash, who is advertised on the cover as the “bestselling author of Serena.” The book is entitled Something Rich and Strange, echoing the title of a story first published in Shade 2004 and reprinted as part of Nothing Gold Can Stay—a Shakespearian title that, while evoking transformation and change, is full of promises and carefully avoids elucidating its object. A novelist and a poet, Ron ..

Animal Elegy in Ron Rash’s “In the Valley” (2020)

This paper argues that Ron Rash’s 2020 return to his 2009 bestseller, Serena, and to its eponymous character’s destructive frenzy operates as a pretext for him to deal, in his own poetic way, with the devastating consequences of such ruthless exploitative behaviors and their lethal contribution to the sixth extinction. This paper shows that “In the Valley” partakes of the genre of the poetry of extinction. Focusing on the diverse ways in which the valley’s inexorable emptying is represented, it regards “In the Valley” as an animal elegy that poetically represents the inexorable extinction of numerous species.Cet article démontre que le retour de Ron Rash en 2020 à son bestseller paru en 2009, Serena, et à la frénésie destructrice de son personnage éponyme constitue un prétexte lui permettant de traiter des conséquences désastreuses de ce mode d’exploitation sans vergogne et de sa contribution mortifère à la sixième extinction. Cet article inscrit « In the Valley » dans le genre défini comme poetry of extinction, en se focalisant sur les diverses représentations de l’évidement inexorable de la vallée. Le texte est ainsi considéré comme une élégie animale qui dépeint, de manière poétique, l’extinction de nombreuses espèces

Richard Godden, William Faulkner, An Economy of Complex Words

En guise de préambule, Richard Godden s’empresse de préciser que le lien entre économie et langage qui est stipulé dans le titre de son dernier ouvrage critique sur l’œuvre de William Faulkner ne doit pas être compris de manière métaphorique : c’est bien en fonction de leur rapport avec un contexte économique et social spécifique que sont analysées les complexités de l’écriture faulknérienne. Sa démonstration repose sur trois présupposés qui sont clairement exposés dans son introduction : les..

An Interview with Ron Rash

Ron Rash (born in Chester, South Carolina, in 1953) is the author of five novels, five collections of short stories and four collections of poems. He is currently completing his sixth novel, Above the Waterfall. He probably owes the international attention he now enjoys to the publication of Serena (the novel was a 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist), whose plot retraces the fate of a Lady Macbeth-like figure at the head of a timber industry in the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina at the..

Ron Rash's Burning Bright (2010): Rewriting the Debacle of the South in the Present

Burning Bright, paru en 2010, est le quatrième recueil de nouvelles du romancier, poète et nouvelliste américain Ron Rash. Les Appalaches dépeintes par Rash évoquent un Sud sombre et désolé, rongé par la misère et hanté par les figures de l’échec : en effet, bien que les Appalaches de Rash aient joué un rôle tout à fait singulier pendant la Guerre de Sécession, le scénario de l’essentielle défaite du Sud semble ici rejoué et réinterprété à l’envi. L’une après l’autre, ces nouvelles exposent la manière dont le Sud se retrouve immanquablement piégé dans le cercle vicieux de sa propre faillite. Cependant, malgré l’austérité du contexte qu’elles évoquent, ces nouvelles génèrent des figures poétiques saisissantes qui brûlent, littéralement, d’un vif éclat l’imaginaire du lecteur. Construit autour d’un traumatisme fondateur qui a fini par acquérir les dimensions d’un mythe, Burning Bright émerge d’une tension caractéristique, entre noirceur et écla

Elizabeth Spencer’s Other Southern Landscape: The Southern Woman in Italy, Or Voicing the Allure of Foreignness

Privilégiant les quatre récits italiens sélectionnés pour The Southern Woman, cet article analyse l’entrelacs des représentations de l’italianité et de l’américanité, en examinant l’usage que fait Elizabeth Spencer des stéréotypes, contrastes, effets de miroir et contre-représentations, du point de vue de personnages-narratrices qui vivent et, pour la plupart, apprécient l’attrait de l’étrangeté et leur statut de résidentes temporaires dans une zone intermédiaire assez faste entre continents et cultures

"… trying to find out how to balance tragedy and comedy": an Interview with Lisa Alther

Born in Tennessee, Lisa Alther is not a typical Southern writer. After leaving the South for her studies, she spent several years in the North and in various foreign countries like France which she used as the backdrop for her 1995 novel Five Minutes in Heaven. She has written six novels, a memoir and a narrative history, Blood Feud: The Hatfields and the McCoys: The Epic Story of Murder and Vengeance (2012). Recently, she and her long-standing friend, French artist Françoise Gilot, have brou..

New Orleans Sketches et la Nouvelle-Orléans de Faulkner : promenades littéraires et premiers pas dans la fiction

At the beginning of 1925, Faulkner who was then getting ready for his first extended trip to Europe, lived six months in New Orleans, where he was struck by the city’s intense cultural bustle. It is in New Orleans that, encouraged by Sherwood Anderson, he worked on his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, and published in the local press a series of sketches and stories that he wrote day to day. The texts, which were eventually put together and published by Carvel Collins in 1958 under the title New Orleans Sketches, constitute a late testimony of Faulkner’s first steps in fiction. But because of their formal imperfections and incompleteness, commentators have often disregarded them. This paper therefore proposes a reassessment of these texts by suggesting that they should actually be considered as what they are: the first sketches of an artist that is on the lookout for the forms and figures that will soon characterize his writing, but through which, for the time being, the plural, protean portrayal of a singular city is sketched

Figures of Violence in Ron Rash’s The World Made Straight

In The World Made Straight, Ron Rash’s writing, faithfully anchored in the Appalachian territory, takes the form of a temporal maelstrom, in which times reverberate and history mingles with stories. The violence of past events—in this case a bloody episode of the American Civil War—is repeated in the present of narration, which evokes the rampant drug culture in the 1970s. From one period to the next, though its motivations have changed, mimetic violence invariably hits the members of the same community. Strikingly enough, the omnipresent figures of violence in Rash’s fiction are likely to adopt circuitous representational strategies. Their evocative power is reinforced by repetition, their inscription in ordinariness and the poetization of details that conceal as much as they reveal the multiple causes of violence