Ba Hannah: In he Academ b No of I Bad Vice Uniei of Ween Bohemia, Pleň, Cech Repblic Abac This essay is a survey of Barry Hannah criticism to date and argues that though he might accurately in some sense be called a postmodern southern author, and more specifically a postmodern heir to William Faulkner, this is certainly not the way he viewed himself. In fact, much of the authorȕs fiction seems to be an attack on academics and other writers who attempt to subvert fiction as well as history with criticism or scholarship. The author of the essay draws from Hannahȕs novels Geronimo Rex (1972), Ray (1980), and Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001), as well as from numerous short stories. Keod twentieth-century southern literature; Barry Hannah; postmodern southern fiction; academic satire In the short story ȒRide, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter,ȓ one of Barry Hannahȕs many hyperbolic, yet autobiographical protagonists, Captain Ned Maximus, bitterly reports that he has been cast out of academia Ȓover in the school in Alabama,ȓ where everybody Ȓhas about exactly enough courage to jaywalk or cheat a wife or a friend with a quote from Nietzsche on his lips.ȓ 1 This quotation is indicative of the adversarial relationship with institutions of higher learning Hannah depicts in most of his major fictions, from his PEN/Faulkner- winning debut novel Geronimo Rex (1972) to the campus mystery/satire Nightwatchmen (1973), the carnivalesque acid-in-the-punchbowl faculty party stories in Airships (1978), such as ȒLove Too Longȓ and ȒBehold the Husband in His Perfect Agony,ȓ to the warrior-poet protagonist of Ray (1980), up to the authorȕs final novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001), in which Hannah seems to take great relish in taking the wind out of the very institution which sustained, and to a lesser extent valorized him. Though the lionȕs share of Hannah criticism depicts him as a postmodern heir to Faulkner, Hannah shunned both the labels southern and postmodern, and once even declared himself an Ȓelder modernist.ȓ 2 Though he acknowledges a debt to As I Lay Dying as an influence, Hannah saw himself more in the mode of French or Francophile existentialists such as Camus or Beckett, and 1. Barry Hannah, ȒRide, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter,ȓ in Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories (New York: Grove Press, 2010), 121. 2. Wells Tower, ȒBarry Hannah [Writer] in Conversation with Wells Tower [Writer],ȓ Believer, October 2010: http://www.believermag.com/issues/201010/?read=interview_hannah_tower. Moravian Journal of Literature and Film 3, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 17–36. ISSN 1803-7720.