Professor Publishes New Book on Memory in the Literature of the U.S. South

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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. -- In Possessing the Past: Trauma, Imagination, and Memory in Post-Plantation Southern Literature, University of Arkansas researcher Lisa Hinrichsen examines recent theories of memory developed by trauma studies and psychoanalytic theory in relationship to modern and contemporary literature of the U.S. South. This region has often been described as more concerned with the past than the future, more with tragedy than progress. Possessing the Past critically examines the narratives, memories and fantasies that create this version of the region. The book illuminates the tangled relationships between private imaginative experience, social power, and communal means of managing trauma as rendered in modern and contemporary southern literature. Reflecting the way modernity and postmodernity undermine the stabilizing grounding of memory and community, Possessing the Past traces how trauma is mediated through fantasy and how fantasy becomes a way of adjudicating identity. Hinrichsen adapts psychoanalytic concepts to literary analysis and offers richly nuanced readings of texts by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Bobbie Ann Mason, Clyde Edgerton, Erna Brodber, Roberto Fernández, Lan Cao and Monique Truong as well as autobiographical work by Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, Willie Morris and Houston A. Baker. Possessing the Past offers new ways of conceptualizing southern memory, history, place, and community.

Hinrichsen seeks to unravel how the region's literature both stages and displaces critical confrontation with history and identity through complex systems of remembrance and erasure. She analyzes issues of law, testimony and social justice; the role of nostalgic fantasies of gentility in mid-century literature; the relationship between white identity, empathy, and social fantasy; the resemblance between southern patterns of disavowal and national ideologies of forgetting in Vietnam-era fiction; and the impact of contemporary multicultural literature on ways of understanding regional memory and community.

Hinrichsen will begin in August as an associate professor of English and Director of the masters and doctorate programs in English in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. Possessing the Past: Trauma, Imagination, and Memory in Post-Plantation Southern Literature was published by Louisiana State University Press.