HU5034

This course is focused on Southern writers, Southern literature, and Southern culture. Students will read such authors as William Faulkner, Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Thomas Jefferson, and Mark Twain. We will cover themes and topics in a variety of genres, including novels, short stories, poems, and autobiographies; attempt to position these works within their social contexts; and explore how class, race, gender, sexuality, and religion, among other axes of identity, have factored into Southern literary production. Specific sites of interrogation will include slavery-its legacies and impact on race and ethnicity; the politics of women's writing; the creation and deployment of the Southern Gothic; the omnipresence of class tensions; and the recurring penchant for agrarianism. Questions explored will include the following: What is the South? Where does our notion of the South come from? Is there such a thing as Southern literature?