Customer Reviews

Outside the Southern Myth

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Hardly the pity-fest that an earlier Amazon reviewer would have you take it for, Noel Polk's Outside the Southern Myth is a fascinating glimpse into a South that, although probably closer to the South that most Southerners live in, often goes ignored in literature, television, music, and film in favor of depictions of hard-drinkin' good ol' boys or genteel aristocrats. Sure, the South has plenty of both (though I haven't seen a white linen suit or a mint julep in a while), but Polk's book complicates the traditional view of Southern life and shows that a middle-class Southern experience can be just as rich, tragic, perplexing, and worthy of study as any Faulkner novel.

As transactions go, it was perfect. Everything that is to be expected in the purchase of a book has been met in terms of condition and arrival time. As the book is concerned, this book was a required reading for a class and I find it to challenge one's preconceived notions of what it really means to be "Southern" as Polk tends to peel away the layers of stereotypes through personal experience and observance of his own heritage.

A valid, if self-serving, premise sadly negated by Polk's ham-fisted execution. "Demythologization" in the hands of a master (Marx, Bultmann, Ricoeur, even Snuffy Smith) this surely ain't. Unfortunately, Polk is typical of a brand of morose mediocrity, tricked out as literary scholarship, that abounds in the bush leagues of academia.

This is a self-revealing and boring book. Polk argues that he is not a product of his Southern background, no, he is somehow "better." But even if he abhors the fact, nothing could document more thoroughly his being solidly within "the Southern Myth" than his own pronouncements. So he is ashamed of bare feet, who cares? What on earth convinced the press to publish this vain cry of unnecessary self-pity.

An Oxford reader