WRITERS OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH AND THEIR LITERARY LEGACY

 Week 2: Romancing the South Core Reading: Welty, Eudora. “Place in Fiction.” In The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews. New York: Vintage, 1979. Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. Reprint (New York 1993). Read the first four chapters to get a feel for the language and imagery. Recommended reading: McPherson, Tara. “Romancing the South: A Tour of the Lady’s Legacies, Academic and Otherwise.” In Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. From the Blackwell Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South (2007) – the chapter titled “Writing Southern Cultures” p 2-19. Uploaded for you.  Week 3: The South as a “Problem” Core Reading: Smith, Lillian. From Killers of the Dream. Baldwin, James. “Going to Meet the Man” Recommended Reading: Cobb, C. James. “The Mind of the South” in Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Griffin, J. Larry. “Why was South a Problem to America?” In The South as an American Problem. Ed Larry J. Griffin and Don H. Doyle. Athens, Georgia: Georgia University Press, 1995.  Week 4: The South and the Impossible Load of the Past Core Reading: Faulkner, William. “Dry September.” Recommended Reading: Cobb, C. James. “The South of Guilt and Shame” in Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.  Week 5: The South and Ιnvisibility . Core Reading: Excerpt from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man Welty, Eudora. “Where is the Voice Coming From?” Recommended Reading: Cobb, C. James. “Southern Writers and ‘The impossible Load of the Past’” in Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.  Week 6: The South and the Civil Rights Movement (I) W.E.B. Du Bois “I. Of our Spiritual Strivings” from The Souls of Black Folk Martin Luther King “I Have a Dream” Flannery O’Connor. “Everything that Rises must Converge.” Recommended Reading: For an overview of 20th century black american history watch the 2013 movie The Butler (dir. By Lee Daniels)  Week 7: The South and the Civil Rights Movement (II) Zora Neale Huston. “How it Feels to be Coloured Me.” Alice Walker. “Everyday use.”  Week 8: Queering the South Core readings: Randall Kenan. “The Foundations of the Earth.”  Week 9: Grotesque Transgressions (I) Core Reading: McCullers, Carson. “The Ballad of the Sad Café.” (Penguin Classics Reprint, 2002).  Week 10: Grotesque Trasgressions (II) We will read the second part of Carson McCullers’ novella “The Ballad of the Sad Café.” We will explore constructions of femininity, masculinity and androgyny in her text, and will discuss the ways in which McCullers’ grotesque subjects create a menacing and ultimately transgressive literary landscape. Recommended Reading: Consult: Bloom, Harold (ed). Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005.  Week 11: The Displaced South Core Reading: O’Connor, Flannery. “The Displaced Person” in The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. Recommended Reading: Theodosiadou, Youli. “Ethhnicity as Otherness in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Displaced Person.’” In Southern Ethnicities. Thessaloniki: Kornelia Sfakianaki Editions, 2008.  Week 12: From American South to South America Core Reading: Cisneros, Sandra. “Woman Hollering Creek.” (1991). Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) – Excerpt from this work  Week 13: Revision Day Recommended: From the Blackwell Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South (2007) – the chapter titled “Searching for Southern Identity” p 591- 607. Uploaded for you. Ladd, Barbara. “Dismantling the Monolith: Southern Places – Past, Present, and Future.” In South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Ed. Suzanne W. Joens and Sharon Monteith. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.