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Lehrende/r: Rebecca Harrison
Veranstaltungsart:
Seminar
Anzeige im Stundenplan:
05.866.313
Semesterwochenstunden:
2
Unterrichtssprache:
Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl:
- | 30
Anmeldegruppe: AS 313
Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie
Zulassung gemäß Richtlinie über den Zugang zu teilnahmebeschränkten Lehrveranstaltungen vom 07. März 2007.
Nähere Informationen hierzu entnehmen Sie bitte www.info.jogustine.uni-mainz.de/senatsrichtlinie
Inhalt:
The literature of the American South has been an established, growing, and prolific area of study since the 1950s. Yet, shaped by the Agrarian movement and New Criticism, this trajectory of canonization and criticism marginalized women and minority writers. Indeed, Southern women writers occupied an ambiguous position where their “feminine” style was historically dismissed as frivolous, domestic, local color, and outside the mainstream of historical concerns and significance allegedly identifiable in the works of white Southern men. In his 1980 collection A Southern Renaissance, Richard King goes as far as justifying the exclusion of women from his volume because they were not “concerned primarily with the larger cultural, racial, and political themes” of the South. This critical paradigm politely moves the women writers of the Southern Renaissance to the sidelines as King argues they neglect to place the “true” concerns of the region “at the center of their imaginative visions” (8-9). Such exclusions, as Susan Donaldson notes, are misguided, political, and depend on the ways in which history, culture, legitimacy, and the centrality of region are defined and controlled. It is only in the last three decades that revisionist scholars, historians and literary critics alike, have begun the work of redefining the literature of the South and excavating Southern women’s histories and writings with innovative lenses of inquiry.
This class, thus, examines the growing field of the female tradition in Southern literature based around a representative grouping of Southern women writing in and around the modernist period (with one glance forward). As a class, we will investigate their complex, diverse, and, at times, problematic conceptions of self, community, race, history, aesthetic sensibilities, and, of course, their plight as Southern women writers. In addition to the primary texts, students will engage in critical dialogue with the revisionist scholars—Carol Manning, Anne Goodwyn Jones, Louise Westling, Anne Firor Scott, and the likes—responsible for the increased visibility of and redefinition of critical paradigms applied to Southern women’s writing.
Empfohlene Literatur:
Primary texts may include
Lillian Smith: Killers of the Dream,
Ellen Glasgow: Barren Ground,
Eudora Welty: The Collected Stories,
Julia Peterkin: Scarlet Sister Mary,
Carson McCullers: Member of the Wedding,
Evelyn Scott: Escapade, and
Dorothy Allison: Bastard Out of Carolina.
All additional primary and critical reading will be available electronically or hard copy handouts
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