Abstract
One of the contemporary writers who followed in Morrison’s footsteps was Southern writer Bobbie Ann Mason. However, Mason’s path to writing about visuality was markedly different from Morrison’s. While Morrison’s decision to “peck away at the condemning gaze” grew out of her observations about the ideological work images performed in communicating racism and sexism, Mason was prompted to explore the contemporary impact of popular media because she recognized its growing importance in the lives of the people she wanted to write about, people living, for the most part, in rural western Kentucky. She has explained, “the characters in my world don’t have the guidance or perspective to know that there might be this other view of television or malls. They’re in that world and they like television fine, thank you. And they love the malls, and I don’t judge them for it. When they go to the shopping mall… they’re looking at deliverance from a hard way of life” (“Bobbie Ann Mason’s Border States”). Though Mason does not judge her characters, or readers, for being attracted to popular and consumer culture, she does seek to help them develop a critical perspective with which to evaluate the possibilities presented to them by media and consumerism. Moreover, Mason pioneered new literary techniques in order to explore the shaping effect of electronic media on human perception, techniques that seem, even after nearly thirty years, increasingly relevant given the recent turn to issues of cognition within literary studies.1 Though Mason is best known for leading the “regional renaissance” in American literature in the 1980s, I suggest her work is equally important and deserving of attention for its contribution to women writers’ critical engagement with contemporary media.