Browsing by Subject ""The Other""
  • Item
    Carson McCullers and Modernism
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2016-10-28) Johnson, Margaret Anne ; Brantley, Will ; Hibbard, Allen ; Renfroe, Mischa ; English
    To read Carson McCullers solely through the lenses of autobiography, Southern regionalism, or the Gothic—as many scholars and critics have done in the past—is to neglect her artistry as a writer who also scrutinized and worked within the aesthetics and thematics of American modernism. McCullers presented the complexities of modernity itself: the desire to make meaning in an impersonal society; the sense that institutions of the past no longer function in the present; the questioning of a larger purpose when "truth" itself seems artificially constructed; and the need to erase the distance between the self and “other” because “othering” produces racial and ethnic discrimination, particularly in the American South where McCullers was born and bred.