13th Annual Ozarks Studies Symposium
September 19-21, 2019
Theme: The Ozarks in Reality and Imagination
Entrance to the symposium is free and pre-registration is not required. Those who attend will be invited to register on site when they arrive.
Entrance to the symposium is free and pre-registration is not required. Those who attend will be invited to register on site when they arrive.
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Below is the program from our 2018 Symposium. The 2019 program will be available by this summer.
The Shepherd of Hills and The Re-Creation of Brian Kent (1919) were an inspiration for Guy Howard. A native of Iowa and a young widower, he read the two novels before he decided to move to the Ozarks. The word Ozarks became for Howard "a symbol of haven—a symbol of peace and quiet [and] the refuge of [a] weary man" (Walkin' 36). Both Dad Howitt (the main character of The Shepherd of Hills) and Guy Howard come to the Ozarks in search of spiritual and emotional restoration, eventually tending to others' needs as Christ did. Similar to Wright, Howard serves the hill people of southern Missouri as their "shepherd."
Reading Wright's That Printer of Udell's (1903) at age eleven was a turning point in President Ronald Reagan's life. In the words of Reagan, the novel "had an impact I shall always remember. […] The term 'role model' was not a familiar term in that time and place. But I realize I found a role model in that traveling printer whom Harold Bell Wright had brought to life. He set me on a course I've tried to follow even unto this day. I shall always be grateful." The novel made Reagan aware of the presence of good and evil in this world. Reagan's political career was riddled with controversy and Wright's social gospel is not exactly in line with Regan's right-wing ideology. However, it is undeniable that Wright's idea of moral clarity laid the foundation for "Reagan conservatism."
Due to its limited availability, Parson Brooks has received little scholarly treatment, yet it remains a significant text in Ozarks studies for several reasons. First, Monteith is a noteworthy figure in the history of Missouri, serving as a progressive state superintendent of schools from 1871 to 1874, during which time he established public schools for African-Americans throughout the state and worked to establish four normal schools. Second, Monteith directly based the setting and characters in Parson Brooks on his home and neighbors at the foot of Buford Mountain, north of Pilot Knob, Missouri. In doing so, Monteith provides a verbal snapshot of life in southeastern Missouri during the early 1870s, a place and culture that would soon undergo rapid and irrevocable change with the coming of railroads and the timber and mining companies. Third, Parson Brooks is an early challenge to the representation of the Ozarks as a place of isolation and exceptionalism. This presentation will explore how Monteith depicts the Ozarks as a crossroads of culture as he provides an entertaining study of the forces shaping the region. Of special interest is Monteith's use of main characters who are transplanted representatives of northern and southern ideals and who debate the cultural benefits and consequences of progress, a debate that seems to undermine the author's defense of progress.
Emulating his great mentor Nabokov, Harington insists that time does not advance with mindless linearity, but instead moves in magically repeated patterns that pay tribute to the inspired human imagination from time immemorial. In this philosophically conservative view of time and history, Harington emphasizes the organic genius of Native Americans' allegedly "primitive" art, as he does throughout his novels, consistently honoring the profound work of their imaginations even when it appears only as ruins and remnants, vestiges of human cultures that his beloved Stay Morons replace but also (often unknowingly) renew.
Still, if his Nabokovian sense of gleefully recurrent time consistently roots Stay More in Native American culture, Harington also perpetuates numerous colonialist motifs in his treatment of the earliest human inhabitants of this continent. In fact, one could argue that Harington's work displaces some of the horrors of this country's treatment of blacks into his inextricably contradictory treatment of Native Americans. From the complicated "noble savage" portrait he draws of Fanshaw in The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks to Clifford Stone's attempts to imitate the cliff-dwellers in Farther Along to the eponymous heroine's composition of a nonfiction book about the Osage nation in Ekaterina to the selectively defiant Osage millionaire Juliana Heartstays in Thirteen Albatrosses, or Falling Off the Mountain, Harington could never add a chapter to the Stay More saga without, in some way or other, both honoring the native inhabitants and, yet, affixing them with some of the racist tropes so deeply embedded in U. S. traditions.
"Sage & Osage: Donald Harington and the Long History of the Ozarks" adapts some ideas from Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination to illuminate Harington's tellingly complicated treatment of Native Americans. In short, the Faulkner of the Ozarks seems to have his colonialism and yet to undermine it too, especially to assert and fulfill his tragicomedic vision of incorrigible sociability as the antidote to inescapable human loneliness, the endless quest for a loving other that unifies all of his work.