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"In "Southern Hyperboles: Metafigurative Strategies of Narration," Michał Choiński confronts the often paradoxical and excessive elements of southern literature, focusing on dominant narrative modes and representation strategies in works produced from the early 1930s to the late 1950s. With renewed attention to renderings of the gothic and grotesque, Choiński argues that modernist literature from the U.S. South often deploys the trope of hyperbole, which escalates, contrasts, and disrupts the sense of the normal. By focusing on how writers processed the South via narratives of hyperbolic excess, "Southern Hyperboles" explores a mode of comprehension forged from the tensions of a segregated, patriarchal society driven by racial and social decorum. Moving chronologically, Choiński traces distinct manifestations of hyperbolic metalogic in the works of seven authors: Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Lillian Smith, Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, and Harper Lee. The mode of hyperbole identified by Choiński relies on a clash of opposites, along with the rapid intensification of disharmonious ideas pushed to extremes, leading to an ultimate break in established decorum. The shock produced by hyperbole generates a momentary state of confusion that soon dissipates, allowing recipients to reach a new understanding of their surrounding world. Melding an innovative use of rhetorical theory with finegrained analysis of literary texts, "Southern Hyperboles" elucidates contradictory and interlocking issues related to memory, social trauma, grotesquerie, and troubled mythologies that permeate the U.S. South"-- Hyperbole and the South: figurative modes of cognition -- Rites of passage: Katharine Anne Porter -- The polyphony of the past: William Faulkner -- Breaking out of hyperbole: Lillian Smith and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin -- Hyperbolic dissolution: Tennessee Williams -- Hyperbolic epiphany: Flannery O'Connor -- To kill the watchman: Harper Lee -- Coda.
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