Understanding Randall Kenan

James A. Crank

Description

The first book-length study of the life and writings of the critically acclaimed Southern writer

Randall Kenan is an American author best known for his novel A Visitation of Spirits and his collection of stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a nominee for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and named a New York Times Notable Book. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Whiting Writers Award, Sherwood Anderson Award, John Dos Passos Award, Rome Prize, and North Carolina Award for Literature.

Understanding Randall Kenan is the first book-length critical study of Kenan, offering a brief biography and an exploration of his considerable oeuvre—memoir, short stories, novels, journalism, folklore, and essays. Kenan's writing can be complex and sometimes highly stylized while covering a broad range of topics, though he often explores African Americans' complicated relationships, specifically as they struggle to make connections along other axes of class, gender, and sexual identity. Crank explores these themes and how they influence Kenan's work through a personal interview with the author.

Series Editor's Preface
Preface: Remembering Randall Kenan (1963-2020)
Acknowledgments
1. Understanding Randall Kenan
2. A Community of Witches
3. Speaking for/Speaking to the Dead
4. Brother Baldwin and the Shadow of Tims Creek
5. Afterword: Randall Kenan Takes Flight
Appendix A: Writing B(l)ack: An Interview with Randall Kenan
Appendix B: Tims Creek Genealogy
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Literary Figures
• Modern
• LGBTQ+
• True Identity
• Daniel Wallace (author)
• Objective correlative
• Randall Kenan
• Garry Wills
• Spirit guide
• Ross Lockridge, Jr.
• Modern history
• Great Disappointment
• Spirituality
• Joel Chandler Harris
• 21st Century
• Inception
• Do the Right Thing
• Rick Moody
• Sherwood Anderson
• Zora Neale Hurston
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Gay
• Tom Wolfe

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 28 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611179590
• Langue: English

Extrait

UNDERSTANDING RANDALL KENAN
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
UNDERSTANDING
RANDALL KENAN
James A. Crank
2019 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-61117-958-3 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-959-0 (ebook)
Front cover photograph by Miriam Berkley
http://www.miriamberkley.com
For Trudier Harris,
my teacher,
my mentor,
my colleague,
my friend.
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Understanding Randall Kenan
Chapter 2
A Community of Ghosts
Chapter 3
Speaking for/Speaking to the Dead
Chapter 4
Brother Baldwin and the Shadow of Tims Creek
Appendix A: Writing B(l)ack: An Interview with Randall Kenan
Appendix B: Tims Creek Genealogy
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives-and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I would very much like to thank Randall for his generosity and willingness to allow me to pepper him with questions, bug him with details, ask him to vet sources and facts, and, in general, poke and prod through the complexities of his fiction and life. I am especially grateful to him for allowing me to interview him twice: once for information concerning his biography and once for the interview that makes up the entirety of Appendix A . I am also thankful for the Tims Creek Genealogy that Mr. Kenan provided to me and that appears here as Appendix B ; it will doubtless prove useful to scholars and readers of his fiction. It is, indeed, a rare thing to have an opportunity to meet one of your heroes but quite another thing entirely to have the experience be so affirming, such a sincere and genuine pleasure. Thank you so much, Randall.
Second, every book needs an entire separate thank-you entry for Linda Angell. I don t think I can thank her enough, not simply for the tireless work she does on my books but for just being who she is: a bestest friend, a confidant, a collaborator, and a world-class editor. Every writer should have his or her own Linda Angell-but you should find your own. I call dibs on mine.
Beyond those two fantastic folks, I have an entire village to thank for its emotional and intellectual support, but I should start first with the University of Alabama, and specifically both the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of English, which have provided so much financial support and encouragement during this process, especially the CARSCA Grant Committee, who funded my trips to Chapel Hill to speak with Mr. Kenan twice. I have some of the best colleagues ever, and they have been there for me every step of this process, so thank you: Bob Olin, Tricia McElroy, Joel Brouwer, Wendy Rawlings, Trudier Harris, David Deutsch, and all my colleagues on Team English. Special thanks to Jim Denton at USC Press and to Linda Wagner-Martin always-a true friend and the best mentor any student could ever dream of having.
I have had wonderful friends and family (biological and chosen) who have helped me in more ways than I can say: Jeff (every book is yours); Phyllis and Bill Agnew; Dad, Shelly, Steve, Don, and Daniel Crank; Abbie and Renee; Merinda, Nathan, Arlo; Memorie, Joe, Sam, Tucker; Samantha Hansen; Mark Hernandez, Cristian Asher, Dean Skiles; Heidi Norwood; Molly McGehee FLOBEBE; Erich Nunn and Amy Clukey (the band); Michael Bibler and the whole SSSL crew; Kate, Layton, and Joshua Whitman; Sharon Holland; the best students any professor has ever had; my family of friends that I have been stuncle to; and always, of course, Maddie, forever and ever, amen.
And, finally, this book has benefited from amazing graduate students, who have worked with me to compile bibliographies, edit, and work through indices. Thank you so much: Candace Chambers, Jenna Lyles, Sarah Landry, Tucker Legerski, and Jeffrey Jones.
CHAPTER 1
Understanding Randall Kenan
I wanted to write before I knew I wanted to write, and write I did, talking back, writing back, on paper, to Beatrix Potter, to Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe and Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys.
Randall Kenan, An Ahistorical Silliness in The Fire This Time
Though Randall Garrett Kenan was born in the early spring of 1963 in Brooklyn, New York, he found himself very quickly the citizen of a state that would become not just his adopted homeland, but, indeed, the central focus of much of his intellectual and artistic exploration: North Carolina. Only six weeks old, the young Kenan was shuttled off from the big city of New York to the small, rural community of Duplin County, North Carolina, where he lived briefly with his grandfather and his seamstress grandmother in the thriving small town of Wallace. At first, his grandparents-who ran a dry-cleaning establishment-hired someone to take care of the boy while they worked, but his great-aunt, Mary Fleming, his grandfather s sister, and his great-uncle Redden immediately took a shine 1 to the baby and would take him away for weekends to the family farm in Chinquapin, about fifteen miles east of Wallace, Kenan remembered; the farm and the country were very different from the town where Kenan s grandparents lived. It was, as he recalled later, deep, deep country, on the edge of the Angola swamp, it lay on a dirt road, surrounded by fields and woods. My first memories of the place are apple trees, grapevines, pine trees, and an oak tree so large it could blot out the sun, with limbs as thick as small automobiles, a trunk of truly elephantine proportions. 2
Mary quickly recognized that Kenan s grandparents were too involved in running their business to take care of an infant. One weekend she just didn t bring me back, 3 he recalled with a laugh, and Old Field Road became my home. 4 In a short amount of time, Kenan began to call Mary Mama. When Kenan was only three years old, Redden died unexpectedly. In his essay Brother Rabbit versus Brother Fox, Kenan muses that the man s death is one of his earliest memories: When I ask people about their earliest memory, it truly puzzles me when they say it s from preschool, or kindergarten or first grade. Perhaps they are being cautious, but I remember images vividly from ages two and three and, I believe, from earlier. But I have no doubt about three, for that is how old I was when my great-uncle Redden died on my quilt. 5
The loss of Redden greatly affected Kenan s family. In the wake of the man s death, Kenan remembered his grandfather saying to his great-aunt, You re here by yourself, so why don t you just keep the boy? She did, and a young Randall Kenan remained with her for the rest of his childhood and adolescence.
Kenan s biological parents were not married, and the young boy never knew much of his mother, who stayed behind in Brooklyn. However, his father moved back to Wallace not too long after Kenan was adopted. Still, Kenan s intellectual, emotional, and familial mentor was Mary, who was adamant that the young boy learn the fundamentals of language from an early age; she taught him to read when he was only four years old. A kindergarten teacher by trade and used to working with children Kenan s age, Mary Fleming could relate well to the child in her care. She bought him books: one of his first loves. Kenan remembered that the first book she got him was Peter Cottontail , and on my fifth Christmas I got this adaptation of Moby Dick , which I still can t find, because that book was kind of long gone, but I remember it vividly because it was one of those graphic adaptations for younger readers with big pictures and all that sort of thing. 6 The young Kenan found himself captivated by the world of words and images. I was reading all the time, he recalled. I discovered comic books not long after that. The Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Cruso