Subject Area
Literary Criticism
Abstract
In Lost Memory of Skin (2011), his twelfth novel, Russell Banks continues his exploration of the dark underbelly of American society—in this instance, the moral wilderness of a group of convicted sex offenders exiled to living beneath a concrete causeway in the south Florida city of Calusa, a fictionalized Miami. Banks, who has long been “our premier chronicler of the doomed and forgotten American male” (Schulman 8), focuses in Lost on a twenty-two-year-old parolee referred to throughout only as “The Kid.” While guilty and duly convicted of propositioning an underage girl online for sex, The Kid is still presented in the narrative not as a predator nor a victim of an overzealous judicial system, but as somehow all-too-representative. With a cast of other typologically-named characters, Banks follows an allegorical impetus in Lost, with the Kid on a spiritual journey to discover selfhood beyond the depersonalized, increasingly cyber reality that has engulfed him. Besides commenting upon “the injuries of class society” (Seguin), Banks manages in Lost Memory of Skin to employ a neo-realistic aesthetic while fostering a brand of “new humanism” for American fiction, which rejects some of those “post-human” tendencies and themes evidenced in many other contemporary novelists’ works.
Brief Bio Note
David Buehrer is a Retired Professor of English from Valdosta State University, where he taught courses in world literature, American literature, critical theory, and modern and contemporary American and Latin American fiction. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Delaware in 1991, and he has delivered papers and published articles and books on a wide variety of 20th and 21st-century American and Latin American novelists, including Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Manuel Puig, William Gaddis, Denis Johnson, and Russell Banks.
Keywords
Russell Banks, neo-realism, post-humanism, allegory, contemporary American fiction
Location
Afternoon Session 3 (PARB 239)
Presentation Year
2019
Start Date
4-12-2019 5:30 PM
Embargo
11-9-2018
Recommended Citation
BUEHRER, DAVID J. Dr., "A Pilgrim’s Progress for the Digital, Post-Human(ist) Age?: Social and Religious Allegory in Russell Banks’s Lost Memory of Skin" (2019). South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL). 55.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/seccll/2019/2019/55
Included in
American Literature Commons, Classics Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, East Asian Languages and Societies Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons, German Language and Literature Commons, Language Interpretation and Translation Commons, Latin American Languages and Societies Commons, Latin American Literature Commons, Medieval Studies Commons, Modern Languages Commons, Online and Distance Education Commons, Spanish Linguistics Commons, Spanish Literature Commons, Teacher Education and Professional Development Commons, Women's Studies Commons
A Pilgrim’s Progress for the Digital, Post-Human(ist) Age?: Social and Religious Allegory in Russell Banks’s Lost Memory of Skin
Afternoon Session 3 (PARB 239)
In Lost Memory of Skin (2011), his twelfth novel, Russell Banks continues his exploration of the dark underbelly of American society—in this instance, the moral wilderness of a group of convicted sex offenders exiled to living beneath a concrete causeway in the south Florida city of Calusa, a fictionalized Miami. Banks, who has long been “our premier chronicler of the doomed and forgotten American male” (Schulman 8), focuses in Lost on a twenty-two-year-old parolee referred to throughout only as “The Kid.” While guilty and duly convicted of propositioning an underage girl online for sex, The Kid is still presented in the narrative not as a predator nor a victim of an overzealous judicial system, but as somehow all-too-representative. With a cast of other typologically-named characters, Banks follows an allegorical impetus in Lost, with the Kid on a spiritual journey to discover selfhood beyond the depersonalized, increasingly cyber reality that has engulfed him. Besides commenting upon “the injuries of class society” (Seguin), Banks manages in Lost Memory of Skin to employ a neo-realistic aesthetic while fostering a brand of “new humanism” for American fiction, which rejects some of those “post-human” tendencies and themes evidenced in many other contemporary novelists’ works.
