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Southern Writers

ENGL 263.602
instructor(s):

As Flannery O'Connor writes in "The Fiction Writer and His Country," "No one has ever made plain just what the Southern school is or which writers belong to it." This poses a difficult endeavor for us because this course ultimately asks that very question: Who is the Southern Writer and, more explicitly, what is Southern Literature? In this course we will examine Southern short story writers in the first half of the twentieth-century came to start to answer this question. Paying close attention to issues of gender, race, class, and region we will explore how social events such as the World Wars, the Great Depression, The Great Migration, and continued racial tensions affected the ways that writers understood their Southern identities. In addition to the writers such as Charles W. Chestnutt, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Katherine Anne Porter, and Carson McCullers, we will engage essays as well as popular visual and audio representations of the South.

fulfills requirements
Sector 2: Difference and Diaspora of the Standard Major
Sector 6: 20th Century Literature of the Standard Major