Semester Award Granted
Spring 2025
Submission Date
May 2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]
Stacey Balkan
Abstract
This dissertation, submitted for completion of my Ph. D requirements at Florida Atlantic University, consists of excerpts from a considerably much longer work in progress, tentatively titled Across the Great Divide: Appalachia & The National Imagination. The aim of the work is not only to disabuse certain stereotypes of Appalachia and “Appalachian Literature,” which is a common enough move in Appalachian Studies discourse, but also to problematize the ideas of “Appalachia” and “Appalachian Literature” in and of themselves. Most of four chapters from that study (which contains more than two dozen in its complete form, meaning that these pages will not present, in any sense, the full scope of my arguments, engagements, or concerns) – “For Those Who Love Us Into Interbeing,” “Beyond the Hillbilly Question,” “Appalachia in Fact and (Non-) Fiction,” and “After America, or Before Columbus?” – are offered here (along with passages on the poets Jim Wayne Miller, Marilou Awiakta, and Coleman Barks) as a way of conveying at least a sense of my positional attitude (all of us write from perspective(s), and we’re all lost if we get locked in just one), relationship to my own literary influences (it’s complicated), take (or non-take) on certain prominent modes of discourse about the region (lots of self-serving agitprop and/or neoliberal essentialism), assessment of recent public non-fiction debates over the region (whether or not it reveals anything substantial about Appalachia, it certainly reveals something about the US’ institutional zones and their communicative silos), and, finally, at least a partial nod to what I feel are more fulsome and helpful understandings of not only Appalachian culture, but of relationships between people in general (pragmatist humanists, many but not all of them writers pigeonholed by academe’s neoliberal essentialist establishment as “Black feminists,” have been trying to warn us away from neoliberal essentialism for some time)
Recommended Citation
Prater, Thomas Matthew, "ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE: APPALACHIA AND NATIONAL CRISIS" (2025). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 38.
https://digitalcommons.fau.edu/etd_general/38