LS 741 - Stories of the South

(3.00 cr.)

Southern writers in the past century exhibited a stylistic, philosophical, social, and regional individuality. Some of them are just plain quirky. Their writings look at the future from the perspective of an illusion of the past order, often presenting themselves as the last spokespersons for an order which is needed in modern experience. At the same time, they saw that order as decadent and based on ideals that were hardly realized in actual experience. Finally, many of these writers felt the need to impose a theological perspective they found lacking in mainstream American literature. Participants study the modern myth of the south as revealed by its foremost writers: William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Tennessee Williams, Bobby Ann Mason, and others. Poems by Ransom, Warren, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate are included, as well as analysis of film versions of this myth in such features as Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, In the Heat of the Night, The Liberation of L. B. Jones, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Driving Miss Daisy.