Normative Crisis in Regionalist American Short Fiction

Methodically this essay tries to gauge the usefulness of anthropological and juridical concepts of transition and change for the analysis of short fiction. The first part scrutinizes Victor Turner’s liminality as well as Carl Schmitt’s and Giorgio Agamben’s states of exception as conceptualizations which explain the suspension of normative order in the service of reorientation. In theories of fiction by Jan Mukařovský, Jurij Lotman, and Wolfgang Iser such notions of transition and border-crossing reverberate. The second part of the essay analyzes two regionalist American short stories: Sherwood Anderson’s “Godliness” (1919) is read as a reaction to the transformations of modernity by states of exception, which try to re-establish theocratic sovereignty; and Daniel Woodrell’s “Woe to Live On” (2011) is envisaged as the recollected state of exception of the unbridled lawlessness of the Civil War, which radically inverts all moral codes. The states of exception of these stories lead neither to the reaffirmation of traditional value systems nor to a trajectory of lasting change. They rather highlight the normative disorientation of the modern era.