SUBVERSION AND THE DOUBLE VOICE IN LILLIAN SMITH AND KATHERINE DUPRE LUMPKIN

Lillian Smith and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin provide a subversive framework for the history of the South through the genre of autobiography. This paper will explore how both authors use a double voice to articulate their confrontation with the Lost Cause. On the one hand, the child protagonist is a Southerner and therefore an insider and participant, while on the other hand, the adult protagonist subverts the dominant social discourse thanks to a critical distance which is both physical and psychological. Smith and Lumpkin use autobiography to challenge tradition, hence subverting the central roles of race and gender.

2 Twisted

Why do we speak so insistently of the genome in terms of the Book—even going so far as to literalize this language? Drawing on Bakthin’s insight that our thought begins when we double-voice the words of others, using and re-accenting, this article argues that double-voicing religion is how the scientific secular is made. The insistence on treating scriptural metaphors as somehow real (even though we have long known better) arises from the need to use and thereby re-accent “internally persuasive words” in order to create new ways for words to mean. This article investigates two kinds of dialogue between the science of the gene and the book. Internally, invoking scriptural metaphors enables medical genetics to represent itself as having at long last sutured the gap between thought and being that Foucault deemed central to Western modernity. Externally, invoking the biblical signifier enables medical science to stabilize its popular reception by using “the family” to colonize affect.