Coastal Carolina University

Faculty Member, English

Assistant Professor of English

Coastal Carolina University

About

Daniel Cross Turner (Ph.D. Vanderbilt University, M.A. University of South Carolina, and B.A. Hampden-Sydney College) joined the Coastal Carolina University faculty as an Assistant Professor of Twentieth-Century American Literature in Fall 2010.

As a native South Carolinian and scholar of Southern studies, he was pleased to return to the South, the center of his teaching and research interests, after five years as an Assistant Professor of English at Siena College in Loudonville, New York.

SCHOLARSHIP:

His primary research fields are modern and contemporary U.S. literature, with an emphasis on the literature and culture of the American South, poetics, and film. His published scholarship focuses on questions of regional definition in relation to national and transnational contexts, modes of cultural memory, and connections between cultural and aesthetic forms, especially in their potential to record historical pressures and transitions. He is the author of several articles and book chapters on contemporary writers and filmmakers, which appear in edited collections as well as journals, including *Genre*, *Mosaic*, *The Southern Quarterly*, *The Mississippi Quarterly*, and *The Southern Literary Journal*. He has also published interviews with Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Natasha Trethewey. He is Co-Editor of the Southern literature listserv on H-Net (H-Southern-Lit).

His first book, *Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South*, is under contract with the University of Tennessee Press (projected Fall 2012). The book illustrates how the creative range of poetries produced in and about the contemporary U. S. South from the early 1950s until the present helps to reevaluate theories of collective remembrance on regional, national, and transnational levels. *Southern Crossings* therefore reflects a history that encompasses the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and federally mandated desegregation, the lasting conflicts of the Cold War as well as the American War in Vietnam, the spread of industrial and postindustrial forms of capitalism, the advent of national and international transportation networks as well as urban and suburban zones, and the current politics of identity formation. In addition to tracing trauma and nostalgia, the book offers a more multivalent vision of cultural memory by also exploring lesser known, yet equally compelling uses of the past, such as historiophoty (the recording of history through visual images), primal memory (a hoped-for return to the level of archetypal memory), cartographic simulation (an abstract vision of memory as pure process through poetic mappings of remembered landscapes), and countermemory (resistant strains of collective memory that disrupt the official historical record). The variety of critical approaches demonstrates that “southernness” is not a unitary essence, but a cultural mode that generates overlapping and conflicting levels of identification. Combining analysis of poetry as a historically responsive medium with developments in the fields of memory work as well as regional studies, *Southern Crossings* presents original perspectives on a spectrum of poets, including Betty Adcock, Kate Daniels, James Dickey, Rodney Jones, Judy Jordan, Donald Justice, Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Morgan, Harryette Mullen, George Scarbrough, Dave Smith, Henry Taylor, Natasha Trethewey, Robert Penn Warren, and Charles Wright. Most of these poets have achieved prominence on a national scale, their considerable reputations evident in myriad poetic awards as well the fact that six of these writers have earned at least one Pulitzer Prize for poetry, arguably the highest honor given to a U.S. poet.

His current research project, *Southern/Primitive: Primitivism and Modernity in the U.S. South*, is a book-length study that engages with conjunctions and conflicts between modernity and primitivism—aesthetic, ecological, ethnographic, and philosophical—through the literature, cinema, and other cultural media and artifacts of the transforming U.S. South from 1919 to the present. Southern/Primitive delineates chiasmatic forms of modern primitivism and primitive modernisms under the auspices of the presumably “belated” South. Over the past century, the American South often has been imagined as a land beyond time, a region left behind by the teleological and temporal flows of modernity and nationhood. I consider what happens when primitivistic notions of timelessness, “natural” backwardness, and blunt savagery are applied to the realm of human social organization and culture time. The universalizing, at times even essentialist, impetus behind much primitivist discourse (e.g., the primal nature of humanity across time and place) is given proper geographic and historical specificity when crossbanded with formulations of the backwards, timeless South; the primitive, thus understood, often bolsters ideas of regional exceptionalism, construing the South as erstwhile region, elsewise to the “modern” nation. On what levels have the modern inhabitants of the South—Native, Black, Appalachian, etc.—been marked as “primitive,” and to what political and cultural ends? How might ideas of the primitive help to reassess the influence of national and global cultures expressed regionally, and vice versa? The project draws on definitions of primitivism by critics such as Mariana Torgovnick, James Clifford, and W. J. T. Mitchell as well as recent scholarship in critical race theory and work on the hemispheric/global South. It will include sections on the racialization of the primitive vis-á-vis regional and national identities (“Literary Ethnographies of Region and Race”), on the primitive as a marker of class divisions (“Classifying Bloodlines”), on the ethos of primitivism as a regenerative foray into the quasi-sublime space of environmental deep time (“Into the Mystic”), on representations of totemism that unveil transregional connections between Caribbean, Native, and Southern cultures (“Totemic Poetics/Polemics”), and on the interconnection between new media and the Southern primitive and its incorporation into extranational networks of exchange (“Digital Primitive: Branding the Belated South”). These chapters reflect varied versions of these triangulated modes—primitivism, modernity, and Southernness—from a diversity of regional, ethnic, class, and gendered perspectives. Authors include H. L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Johnson, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Jack Boone, Flannery O’Connor, Davis Grubb, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Allison Hedge Coke, Derek Walcott, Yusef Komunyakaa, Josephine Humphreys, Ron Rash, and Cormac McCarthy. The project will also address several films, such as *Swamp Water*, *The Night of the Hunter*, *Deliverance*, *Matewan*, *O Brother, Where Art Thou?*, and *Nashville*, as well as documentaries on the South and other cultural artifacts, such as painting, photography, sculpture, and popular music.

TEACHING:

In addition to genre courses (including poetry/poetics, film studies, and cultural studies) and special topics courses (e.g., "Animals"; "Many Returns: The Cultural Forms of Nostalgia"; "Comedy"; "Poetry and the Sea"; "Ghosts"), he has designed and taught classes in American literature, from surveys to courses on the Jazz Age, the Cold War, and contemporary U.S. literature. He has also created and led courses in southern studies, including surveys and a seminar on "The Cinematic South" as well as an interdisciplinary travel course, “Blue Ridge to Blue Sea,” on diverse literary and historical subcultures from the western North Carolina mountains to the South Carolina coastal plain (funded by The Watson-Brown Foundation). 

PROFESSIONAL SERVICE

Co-Editor of H-Southern-Lit (H-Net): along with Taylor Hagood (Florida Atlantic University), I serve as editor for the H-Net listserv for Southern Literature, taking over for Martyn Bone (University of Mississippi) and Melanie Benson (Dartmouth College). The H-Southern-Lit list involves weekly postings, commissioned book reviews, as well as monitoring of discussions (2010-present).

Co-Proposer of set of essays on “Literary Architectonics of the U.S. South” for *Southern Spaces: An interdisciplinary journal about regions, places, and cultures of the American South in their global contexts*: along with Lisa Hinrichsen (University of Arkansas), I proposed a set of essays on built environments (including Native earth mounds, country clubs, universities, and gutted houses) in literary and cultural texts of the American South (2011).

Invited referee for University Press of Florida: reviewed a book manuscript on region and place in contemporary literature (2010).

Invited member of Program Committee for the Biannual Conference of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature in Nashville, TN (2012): served with Michael Kreyling (Vanderbilt University), Tara Powell (University of South Carolina), and Gary Richards (Mary Washington University) to accept or reject abstracts/proposals and organize the program for the most prominent national conference for scholars of southern literature.

Invited organizer and chair for “The Mythic South: Mythology and Materialism of the American South,” session sponsored by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature at The Modern Language Association, Seattle, WA (2012).

Invited organizer and chair for “The Afterlives of James Dickey: Creative and Critical Responses,” session sponsored by The James Dickey Review at The South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Atlanta, GA (2011).

Invited organizer and chair for “Literary Architectonics of the U.S. South,” session sponsored by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature at The Modern Language Association, Los Angeles, CA (2011).

Invited organizer and chair for “James Dickey and Learning from Others,” session sponsored by The James Dickey Review at The South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Atlanta, GA (2010).

SELECTED FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTS:

Visiting Research Fellowship, Institute for Southern Studies, University of South Carolina, 2011: fellowship for research into extensive F. Scott Fitzgerald archives at the Thomas Cooper Library as part of my current book-length project, *Southern/Primitive: Primitivism and Modernity in the U.S. South.*

Research Enhancement Grant, Coastal Carolina University, 2011: grant to produce chapter on primitivism and William Faulkner’s fiction for *Southern/Primitive: Primitivism and Modernity in the U.S. South.*

Grant from the Watson-Brown Foundation for “Blue Ridge to Blue Sea: Literature and History of the U.S. South” interdisciplinary travel course, 2010: grant covered entire costs for student travel, accommodations, transportation, and tours for this course.

Faculty Research Fellowships, Siena College, 2007, 2008, and 2010, and Curriculum Diversification Fellowship, 2006

Harold S. Vanderbilt Scholarship, Vanderbilt University, 1999-2003

Thomas Daniel Young Award for Excellence in Teaching, Vanderbilt University, 2003

Dissertation Year Fellowship, Vanderbilt University, 2002-2003

James A. Morris Fellowship, University of South Carolina, 1996-1998

Patrick Henry Merit Scholarship, Hampden-Sydney College, 1991-1995