“Perhaps—perhaps the South will always be like this” says Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s epic saga Gone With the Wind (1936; film version 1939), but Rhett Butler knows better: “Take a good look my dear. It’s a historical moment. You can tell your grandchildren how you watched the Old South disappear one night.” The romantic portrayal of a chivalric South that crumbles and vanishes has shaped the American popular memory of the South and thereby reduced a multifaceted view of the South to a single rosy, nostalgic one. In this course, we will examine the rich tradition of Southern literature and culture in the United States from the Civil War to the present. The term “culture” is construed widely to mean the ways of life as represented by fiction, biography, poetry, cinema, music, photography, history, and religion. Our starting point will be Robert Penn Warren’s and C. Vann Woodward’s meditations on the South (The Legacy of the Civil War and “The Search for Southern Identity” respectively) before we will move on to antebellum (i.e., pre-Civil War) Southern writings: Frederick Douglass’ slave narrative on the one hand and dialect tales by Southwestern Humorists (Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, and Mark Twain) on the other hand. Our focus will then shift to literary depictions of “interracial bonding” in postbellum Southern literature (especially Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885) and then to modern descriptions of the South as found in Jean Toomer’s poetic masterpiece Cane (1923), Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), Southern Gothic writing (especially William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily” and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”), and the Pulitzer Prize winning literary narrative on Southern politics, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946). As to visual treatments of the South, we will discuss Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith, 1915), Showboat (dir. Harry A. Pollard, 1929, and the version dir. by James Whale, 1936), Gone With the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming, 1936), and The Apostle (dir. Robert Duvall, 1997). We will, in short, explore the South, as imagined by Southerners, and focus on how the art and the culture of this region functions ideologically, rhetorically, aesthetically, politically, and religiously in order to reveal constructions of Southern and national identities.
Required texts:
• Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Penguin Classics).
• Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (Penguin Modern Classics).
• A reader with primary and secondary texts will be made available at the beginning of the course.
