AML 4261 Spring 2023 Roberts

The South is where America’s divisions play out most dramatically. Southerners super-size all the nation’s neuroses: race, gender, class, sexuality. Maybe the Civil War never really ended—at least not culturally. The past is ever-present and has the power to warp our future. Four hundred years after the first enslaved people arrived in Virginia, we are still working out how a nation founded on “equal justice” enshrined injustices for so long. Southern writers use their art to express the complexities, beauties and horrors of this “nation within the nation.” Authors studied include (but aren’t limited to) Poe, Hurston, Faulkner, Twain, and Ellison.