American Literature

Catalog description

Mississippi author Eudora Welty said, “Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers…great talkers.” Indeed, the myriad regions, communities, and cultures across the South have produced rich literary legacies. How do writers conceive of, portray, and define the American South? What literary legacies and traditions has the South provided, and how do its geographies and cultures shape American literature? This class will explore how Southern writers craft-and contest-impressions of the South and Southern identity. We will consider how the literature of the South reckons with complex historical legacies, like those of enslavement and the Lost Cause, and we will investigate how Southern literature figures into larger national and global conversations around environment and climate change. In this class, we will read texts by authors like Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Jesmyn Ward, Flannery O’Connor, Silas House, among others. Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.