Topic
for Essay Due April 12
Write an essay of at least 1000 words in which you argue--demonstrate--that the literature of the modern South offers a critique of some distinguishing feature(s) of Southern culture. This literature does not, in other words, represent an unexamined glorification of, say, the Southern family or Southern womanhood (belle, steel magnolia, black mammy, etc.) or Southern (male) chivalry or agrarian life or religious piety or white paternalism or Negro servitude. Quite the contrary. The literature of the modern South, which--to use Allen Tate's terminology--is "dialectical" rather than "rhetorical," reveals the "inner strains, stresses, tensions, the shocked self-consciousness of a highly differentiated and complex society" (see "A Southern Mode of the Imagination" in Tate, Essays of Four Decades, Chicago, 1968).
Draw on the work of three of our authors, but try not limit your discussion to an examination of only three works. Ideally, the essay should consist of cogent generalizations as well as close analysis.