Theology

This course will explore how Southern writers and critics played a crucial role in shaping twentieth-century concepts of what the ethical and aesthetic standards of literature should be. Students will study how modern Southern writers achieved a new realism, turning away from sentimental escapism and glorification of the past to meditate truthfully on the South’s social history. They will read works by the Fugitive Poets, the New Critics, short fiction of O’Connor, Welty, and Porter, and one major novel (such as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner) which helped restore full tragic stature to American fiction.

Content Objectives

This course will explore not only what the best modern Southern Literature has been written about (the ethics), but also how Southern writers and critics played a crucial role in shaping twentieth-century concepts of what literary critical standards should be (the aesthetics). The success of modern Southern writers in creating a regional literature memorable for both its ethical content and its aesthetic quality represents the truest sense in which Southern culture has had a worldwide impact.

Materials

• William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
  
• William Pratt, ed., The Fugitive Poets
  
• various handouts
  
• film of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
  

Methods of Evaluation

The first or “regional” segment of the course, called “The Poetry of Southern Places,” will enable students to read “State Samplers” of selected works from their home states evoking the poetic beauty and moral truth of familiar places. We will study how modern Southern writers achieved a new realism, turning away from sentimental escapism and glorification of the Civil War past to meditate truthfully on the South’s social history. This vigorous new literature would no longer just go back to idealized past times, but rather would bring the stark realities of the past forward in time to serve as moral lessons for present decisions and conduct. Each student will then select one novel or full-length nonfiction book from her or his home state and write an analytical paper on its ethical and aesthetic achievement. One of the options equivalent to a “State Sampler” will be a generous selection of African-American poetry and fiction to observe the large extent to which it shares the thematic concerns and aesthetic standards of Southern Literature.

In the second “ethical/philosophical/literary historical” segment of the course, we will read works by the Southern Fugitive Poets, who by the practice of their art and in their theorizing, established the standards of the New Criticism, which revolutionized the college teaching of poetry in America and indeed the world in the mid-twentieth century. We will trace the conceptual origins of their criteria in excerpts from the dialogues of Plato. Then, turning to excerpts from the Ethics and Poetics of Aristotle, we will trace the thematic and emotional grounding of modern Southern fiction, reading stories by great women writers such as Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter to observe how modern Southern practice and theory clarified the standards of probability in fiction, and one major Southern novel (such as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or Warren’s All the King’s Men or Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner) which helped restore full tragic stature to American fiction. The writing expectations in both segments of the course will include analysis of great works as well as creative writing in emulation of them.<