Alternative Masculinities in Richard Ford’s Fiction and/versus Susanne Bier’s In a Better World

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the construction, and especially the deconstruction, of masculinity in the fiction of the contemporary US writer Richard Ford. The author of six novels and three collections of short stories, and the recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Sportswriter and the Pulitzer Prize for Independence Day, as well as the PEN/Malamud Prize for short fiction, Ford has been heralded both as a novelist and short story writer.¹ Resisting the influence of postmodernism on contemporary American fiction, most of Ford’s works seem to share his stark realism and often-minimalist style, and, indeed, the author himself has often expressed his admiration for other contemporary realist writers such as Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver, among others.² Thus, much criticism has focused on the writer’s style, particularly the realistic, as well as the allegedly “Southern,” ethos that appears to pervade his works.³ Much less has been written, however, on his gender representations.⁴ Moreover, his fiction, when approached from a gender studies angle, has been recurrently accused of sexual conservatism, Ford having been repeatedly pegged as “a man’s writer” (Dionne).