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Intimacy and Distance: William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright

ENGL 284.401
instructor(s):
TR 1:30-3

This course presents four writers whose literary careers were shaped by their respective attempts to represent Southern experience. While each of these writers has gained a considerable reputation as an American writer, the South resonates in their voices, mediates their vision. What each writer confronts, finally, is Southern history as burden and source, convention and curse. This course will explore the myths and cultural codes that foreground life in the South (particularly after the Civil War). We will then proceed towards an examination of how the writers in the course frame Southern experience, given their diferences in race, class, and gender. Works to be read include "Absalom, Absalom", "Their Eyes Were Watching God", "Black Boy", and "The Wide Net and Other Stories". The films "The Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With the Wind" will also be screened. Coursework will consist of two critical essays and a final project.

fulfills requirements