Doug Thompson

How do we read southern literature in a postplantation, postregional, and posthuman moment? How do we address the urgent contemporary catastrophes of the Anthropocene in these newly leveled landscapes? Put simply, how do we parse the levels of human responsibility––both for apocalypse and for deliverance––in contexts where settler-colonial and racial capitalist histories dramatically shape our reality?Reading modern and contemporary southern literary texts from a variety of perspectives, these lectures engage the new materialist, object-oriented ontologies that critique and decenter human agency while uncovering the lasting, determinative, haunting realities of humanity’s detention within what Timothy Morton calls the “weird” web of our entwined social, racial, economic, and natural ecologies.As a concept in the burgeoning conversation about Anthropocenic disaster and climate emergency, the “weird” is a powerful way to conceptualize not just human hubris but also humility: we are no different from, no more powerful than, any other living or inanimate objects—neither the organisms that take up residence in our bodies nor the myriad things that we imagine we create, fashion, patrol, and control.

How do we read southern literature in a postplantation, postregional, and posthuman moment? How do we address the urgent contemporary catastrophes of the Anthropocene in these newly leveled landscapes? Put simply, how do we parse the levels of human responsibility––both for apocalypse and for deliverance––in contexts where settler-colonial and racial capitalist histories dramatically shape our reality?Reading modern and contemporary southern literary texts from a variety of perspectives, these lectures engage the new materialist, object-oriented ontologies that critique and decenter human agency while uncovering the lasting, determinative, haunting realities of humanity’s detention within what Timothy Morton calls the “weird” web of our entwined social, racial, economic, and natural ecologies.As a concept in the burgeoning conversation about Anthropocenic disaster and climate emergency, the “weird” is a powerful way to conceptualize not just human hubris but also humility: we are no different from, no more powerful than, any other living or inanimate objects—neither the organisms that take up residence in our bodies nor the myriad things that we imagine we create, fashion, patrol, and control.

This book traces the origin and development of several propositions, tropes, types, clichés, and ideas commonly associated with the U.S. South—for example, that it has been shaped by a warm climate; that its people are hospitable and enjoy a slower pace of life; that it is characterized by localist tendencies and possesses a distinctive sense of place. Approaching these propositions as memes—that is, group-forming replicators—Scott Romine argues that many of them developed in defense of slavery and evolved in its aftermath to continue to form a southern group whose “way of life” naturalized an emergent regime of segregation. Following the civil rights era, another set of mutations allowed the ostensible inclusion of groups heretofore excluded from the category “southerner,” mostly through the conceptualization of a “culture” projected backward into time. By attending closely to the historical formation and mutation of the things southerners have most often said that they are, we can better understand the dynamic and dialogic process of group formation in the U.S. South.

This book traces the origin and development of several propositions, tropes, types, clichés, and ideas commonly associated with the U.S. South—for example, that it has been shaped by a warm climate; that its people are hospitable and enjoy a slower pace of life; that it is characterized by localist tendencies and possesses a distinctive sense of place. Approaching these propositions as memes—that is, group-forming replicators—Scott Romine argues that many of them developed in defense of slavery and evolved in its aftermath to continue to form a southern group whose “way of life” naturalized an emergent regime of segregation. Following the civil rights era, another set of mutations allowed the ostensible inclusion of groups heretofore excluded from the category “southerner,” mostly through the conceptualization of a “culture” projected backward into time. By attending closely to the historical formation and mutation of the things southerners have most often said that they are, we can better understand the dynamic and dialogic process of group formation in the U.S. South.

Two girls dreading the start of the new school year: two years earlier, one had boasted to her friends that she’d had an a air with a teacher, who had subsequently left. Now, to the girls’ dismay, he is unexpectedly returning. Another girl, by the sea, in her room or garden at home, struggling with an impossible love that captivated her during her participation in the school’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A man labouring tirelessly to transform a huge, sloping field above a lychgate into a paradise garden. A woman sitting in her son’s garden, contemplating the sun sinking into the Southern Ocean. What connects these random moments in disparate lives into a poignant, coherent whole?

After serving a prison sentence for bigamy and cashiered from the army, Will Crosby quits England for life as a sergeant in the Queensland constabulary, hoping to regain lost self-esteem and the forgiveness of his wronged ‘wife’, Alice. A typhus epidemic on board ship puts his plans in jeopardy as the vessel and its occupants must spend an indefinite time at the ill-prepared quarantine station on Stradbroke Island. The new, unpredictable relationships Will establishes, especially with Thomas, a lapsed Irish Catholic priest, and Billy, a newly orphaned six-year old, together with his experiences and responsibilities on Stradbroke, project his life in hitherto unimagined directions. The total absence of any Authority on the island forces Will (the future policeman) and Thomas (the ex-priest) into trying to maintain civilised order in desperate circumstances. However, they encounter much hostility, for almost all the emigrants are fleeing authoritarian harshness in England and Ireland, for one reason or another. Crime and violence are rife, and, despite their own anti-authoritarian sympathies, the two friends have no option but to apply whatever justice they can to protect the community. Will’s view of the world is eventually radically changed through his encounter with Tompani, an Aborigine elder, and his people.

For six exciting years Doug Thompson worked as a park ranger at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. In Underground Ranger he passes along the essence of what he learned on this unusual job. He overcame his fear of tight spaces and heights, learned to climb rope, and went on to explore many of the deep vertical caves in the Guadalupe Mountains of west Texas and southeastern New Mexico - including Lechuguilla Cave, one of the most spectacular underground wonders of the world. He even became a member of the park's technical rescue team and made a fifty-story rappel into one of the world's deepest underground pits. He also describes his adventures exploring the surrounding Chihuahuan Desert and shows how caves are related to the earth's surface in a variety of ways, especially through the creative actions of water.