Is "Southern Literature" Alive?: Machine Dream's Incomplete Memories and Their Materiality

미국'남부문학'은 현존하는가?-『머쉰 드림』에 나타난 미완성의 기억과 기억의 물질성

Keeping in mind the hybridity and plurality of Southern Literature, this paper discusses the traits of Southern literature in Jayne Ann Phillips's first novel, Machine Dream. The novel's frequent use of memory and oral reconstruction of a family history accompanied by the feeling of loss in the process of depicting the South's past typically signifies "The Southern" which reminds us of the works of William Faulkner, Katherine Ann Porter, and Eudora Welty. Nevertheless, Phillips's South is more fragmented and her narrative is more evasive and varied than any of her Southern predecessors. The South of the twentieth century from the period of Depression until 1972 is reconstructed differently depending on memories and desires of the four members of Hampson family in this novel, either as a place of nostalgia or as the place of trauma or as the place to survive only in memory. The oxymoronic title of the novel, "machine dreams" signifies that dream and memory of the South cannot remain independent in its epistemological entity but exist as a mixture of materiality of every day life in the modern South. The hybridity of this dream and of the South is what defines itself as Southern. Yet Phillips retains feeling of loss and lament enough to create a modern Southern novel rooted in Southern Literature. Thus, the title itself works an antinomic signifier of both the presence and absence of the dream of the South and of Southern Literature.