WOOT!

[cailj]

A proposal I submitted to the Popular Culture Association's Southern Lit panel at their big conference in San Antonio in April was accepted. The same day I submitted the abstract. The SAME DAY.

Holy God.

And it wasn't a conference -- but a panel. Which means like three people. I was one of three chosen. WOOT!

Go me, go me, it's my birthday.

Comments

[doctorpepper.livejournal.com]

Wahoo, what was the abstract?

[cai.livejournal.com]

Sexual and Religious Reconciliation in Lee Smith’s Saving Grace

Florida Grace Shephard, the protagonist of Lee Smith’s Saving Grace, and daughter of an itinerant Holiness preacher, grows up believing that she "hates Jesus" for his role in determining her family's poverty and incessant traveling. It is problematic however to dismiss religion as having only detrimental effects on Grace’s life. Instead, Smith’s novel is concerned with the reconciliation between Grace and religion. Grace’s father complicates and makes this reconciliation difficult. Virgil Shephard is depicted as both excessively sexual and neglectful of his family. He also represents for Grace, at least on an unconscious level, the image of Jesus. In fact, images of Jesus and the image of her Father are completely inextricable throughout the text, problematizing both Grace’s relationship with her father and that with Jesus. Furthermore, all of her early sexual experiments are tied somehow to religious expression. What results is a complex mingling of family, sexuality, and religion. Her attempts to distance herself from her overly sexual father and an overly demanding Christ figure cause her to travel back and forth between the two, clinging to first one and then the other. The “moment of truth” when Grace must examine and either reject or reinvent her relationships to religion, to Christ, and to sexuality, is the result of these struggles. This paper examines what, in particular, about the female, southern, religious experience influences that moment and the relationships and experiences which create it.