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This course covers political writings, novels, short stories, slave narratives, plays and memoirs from an American region known for its history of slavery and racism, its pronounced cooking styles, its strong sense of family, religion, and especially of place (the "land of cotton," "blue grass," "red hills and cotton," "Dixie") as well as a robust tradition of oral folk literature. Gothic and grotesque aspects of the South and its nostalgia for a sometimes still idealized ante-bellum world of plantations will be explored. Among the writers we will cover are Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, Anne Moody, Ben Robertson, and Dorothy Allison. A reader will be available, but students should purchase the following:
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (also available free online)
Ben Robertson, Red Hills and Cotton
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Anne Moody Coming of Age in Mississippi
Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
N.B. Your reader contains brief essays from State By State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, ed. Weiland and Wilsy (2008) on the following Southern states: Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Missouri, Mississippi, Georgia--birthplaces of the writers whom we will read, and often the setting of their writings. |
