This seminar explores cultural representations of the U.S. South in postbellum fiction and film. We are going to examine in more detail the genre of plantation fiction as well as early filmic depictions of Southern life such as D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939). It is highly recommended to have attended part one of this seminar series. If you have not done so, please prepare by reading Stephen Prince’s Stories of the South. Race and Reconstruction of Southern Identity 1865–1915 (2014) before class. At the end of the seminar, you will have a clearer understanding of how fiction and film participated in the cultural negotiation of gender and race stereotypes in the early twentieth-century. In addition, you will be trained in the basics of film language. The course finishes with an in-class written exam.
