Zora Neal Hurston:

Their Eyes Were Watching God (novel)

Lillian Hellman

The Little Foxes
Toys in the Attic (plays)
An Unfinished Woman (autobiography)

Robert Penn Warren

Brother to Dragons (long poem)
Now and Then(poetry)

Tennessee Williams

The Glass Menagerie
A Streetcar Named Desire (plays)

Flannery O'Conner

A Good Man is Hard to Find (stories)

Eudora Welty

A Curtain of Green (stories)

James Dickey

Deliverance (novel)
Buckdancer's Choice (poetry)

Ralph Ellison

Juneteenth (novel)
Invisible Man (novel)

Barry Hannah

Ray (novel)
Airships (Short Stories)

Berry Morgan

The Mystic Adventures of Roxie Stoner (fictive-sequence)

Rita Mae Brown

Rubyfruit Jungle (novel)

Larry Brown

Big Bad Love (stories)
Joe (novel)

Earnest Gaines

A Lesson Before Dying
Bloodlines
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitmann (novels)

Bobbie Anne Mason

In Country (novel)
Shiloh and Other Stories (stories)

Charles Frazier

Cold Mountain (novel)

Kaye Gibbons

A Virtuous Woman (novel)

Henry Taylor

The Flying Change (poems)

Jill McCorkle

Tending to Virginia (novel)
Crash Diet (stories)

You may also write on any poem or story that we have not discussed in class but appears in a required text. And if you have a favorite piece of Southern Literature not listed here, you may bring that topic to my attention. Because this is an upper division class, my concern is that you avoid simply repeating ideas and information that we have already covered. I don't want a paper version of a class discussion. What I'd like you to do is apply what you have learned to the work that you are reading and then try to go beyond what we have discussed in class. Ideally, you will be able to complete a close reading of the text that shows how the work relates to Southern literature, Southern culture, and/or Southern history. I am very open to theoretical approaches to your topic; the works of Foucault, Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Bahktin, etc. are certainly relevant to what you are reading and those names will come up in class discussion. I am also open to discussions of how a piece reflects or reacts to a particular historical moment, literary movement, or philosophical perspective. Though there are many ways to write a literary paper and I do not wish to proscribe a format, I will provide you with a handout and a writing prompt that should help you get started (its available at http://geocities.datacellar.net/joelpeckham/litprompt.html). Your paper will be graded out of a total of 40 points. And though this is not an exact science, I will follow a rough point breakdown such as this:

5points--Originality, clarity, and relevance of thesis

Here I am looking for your ability to make a clear assertion about the text that can be supported with the help of textual evidence and secondary research. You may also pose your thesis as a question that may be answered near the end of your study. If you are having trouble finding a thesis, consider the subject of the course. You may attempt to discover how your text does or does not fit into a particular part of the Agrarian tradition as it is articulated in I'll Take My Stand, or you might discuss how your text responds to Southern mores regarding gender or racial or class roles important to Southern life at the time the text was written or at the time it was written about. But the possibilities are limitless. What I do not want is a mere cut and paste "report" on what other authors have already said about your text. Try to say something unique about the work. Add something to the discussion.

5 points--Ability to establish a meaningful context for reading the work

Here I want to see you establish any historical, biographical, or cultural background that will directly relate to your argument . Such information would usually appear early on in your essay. You could also introduce any theoretical or philosophical concepts important to understanding the work (for example, if you are going to argue that Flannery O'Conner's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" presents a powerful indictment of nihilism, you should define nihilism and O'Conner's relationship to it early on in the essay). Or, you could present current scholarly debate regarding the subject. Clarifying what other authors have had to say about your topic helps the reader to understand the importance of the discussion and why your particular approach to it is valuable.

10 points--Quality and quantity of Textual Support.

Your thesis should be supported with abundant textual evidence. Put your close reading skills to work here. I want to see you prove your point, citing relevant dialogue, image patterns, representative actions, symbols, tonal nuances, structural oddities, etc. to support each point. Do not simply support what you have to say by citing authorities. The fact that someone agrees with you does not make you right. Show me how you came to your own conclusions.

10 points--Quality, Quantity, and Integration of researched materials

The paper must cite at least 5 sources not including the original text. At least two of your sources should be books and at least two should be articles. Legitimate resources usually include full-length scholarly studies or articles on the text itself or on the author who wrote it. You should not limit yourself these materials, however. Explore the author's other works (including letters, autobiography, essays, etc.) to get a feel for his or her concerns--literary, political, social, etc. If Tennessee Williams liked Camus, go out and read some Camus. If you think Eudora Welty had some interesting things to say about gender relationships in the South, track down some information about gender relationships in the South.

10 points--Quality of writing and organization.

This should be obvious, but I expect your essays to be well-written with clear sentences, complete paragraphs, and a logical, sensible organization. After you've written a draft, look over the paper and ask yourself these questions. Does the organization make sense? Does each paragraph have a clear point? Have I integrated my research into the essay or do I let it pull me off of my main point? Do I anticipate and address possible counter-arguments? Do I have complete control over what I am trying to say throughout? If you can't answer with at least a qualified "yes" to each of these questions, revise the essay until you can.

Because of time constraints, it is absolutely essential that you choose your topic and begin reading and researching immediately. Do not procrastinate.

Again, I am not looking for a simple report. Of course, you should present the major ideas of the author in a memorable and engaging manner. However you must spend a significant amount of your time showing how your article is relevant to the course by drawing specific connections between the literature we have read and your assigned topic. You must come to class with three questions for discussion for that day and be ready to answer questions about your presentation topic. Finally, you must come with 19 copies of a two-page handout on which you provide the most significant passages from your reading. Presentations will be graded on a 10 point scale and will be scheduled on thursdays.

Final Thoughts about Proper Approach to this Course

I assume everyone here likes reading (why else would you want to take the course) but nonetheless, I'll give out this gentle warning: if you don't enjoy reading short stories, poems, or novels, if you find reading a chore rather than a pleasure, this class might not be what you would fully enjoy. I hope that you will enjoy reading each selection--maybe even think of each one as brilliant in its own way--but I don't expect that that will be the case. We are all individuals. We all have different tastes. If you find that you are reading a selection and don't like it, remember that different works of art have different aesthetics. Give the work a second chance, or even a third. If you still don't like it, find an element of the text that relates to something you care about, or try to think about why this work has proved important to other readers of Southern literature and come to class that day prepared to be constructive anyway. I am interested in your opinion, especially if it is phrased intelligently and with an eye for contributing to the class.

Most often the best readers are those who engage with the text in various ways. For this reason, I have designed the course to accommodate many means of interacting with the materials, some traditional and formal, some creative and expressive. At bottom, however, must be the assumption on the part of the reader that all of this matters. I have heard it argued that this is an age of apathy. But if nothing else, literature--and indeed all art--is an integral part of the creation of culture. It is one of the means by which human beings have attempted to wrest meaning from an often chaotic and cruel universe. It matters a great deal.

Much of our class time will be spent discussing literary works--what scholars like to call texts. Let us discuss them as if they were and are living works of art engaged in the process of making meaning--of asking and answering question of justice, faith, and desire, and of creating, affirming, challenging, and reforming cultural values of great import to the author and to ourselves.

The importance of this undertaking requires a commitment on the part of the students. In these discussions I will expect to see evidence that students have carefully read the material and have put some thinking into not only what the text means, but 1) how the author's stylistic and formal choices create that meaning, 2) how the content and style reflect and refract American and Southern culture, 3) why the work may be an important contribution to American or Southern literature and culture as a whole, and finally, 4)how it adds to our understanding of the human condition. The question a reader should be asking is why would this author write this story, poem, or novel at this point in history. Even if you know nothing about the South, you should be able to recognize how the text comments on, creates, and is influenced by power relationships, gender relationships, and race relationships peculiar to the South as well as issues of faith, psychology, and the human condition relevant to any culture or geographic locale. I will also ask that students attempt to negotiate the perilous no-man's land that separates reading with context in mind and assuming that context, historical, cultural, political, or philosophical, controls the meaning of a text. One should never assume that a work by an Agrarian author will necessarily reflect all or only Agrarian values. In fact what may be most interesting in a text might be how it undermines such a systematic, or programmatic approach to thinking. One should also be very careful in assuming that literature accurately reflects Southern life or history--that by reading Faulkner one can fully understand the South. Literature is hardly ever accurate. It is by nature unstable, slippery. And its truths are wonderfully unreliable. But they are truths nonetheless.

When we're not discussing literary works, the culture that surrounds them, and the nature of the universe, we'll be listening to student presentations, responding to active learning responses and aesthetic analyses, and discussing the literary paper. I am fully aware of the rigorous nature of the course. There will be times when even I will have trouble matching its pace. But I will not apologize for it. The authors we will read here are not only the best of the region, but some of the greatest writers in any region in any century. Our struggle will be well compensated. Good luck.