ENG3310 – Spring 2027 – Peebles

This course examines the interconnected ways that literature and film construct ideas of both the American South and the natural environment. Beginning with the premise that neither "the South" nor "nature" are fixed or self-evident categories, students will consider how cultural texts shape our understanding of place, landscape, wilderness, regional identity, and human relationships with the more-than-human world. The course explores how different genres and media represent relationships among environment, culture, race, class, labor, history, and power.

Course materials move across a range of Southern landscapes, including plantations, farms, swamps, forests, mountains, coastlines, small towns, cities, and industrial spaces, and consider how histories of slavery, segregation, migration, extraction, and environmental change remain embedded within them. Films such as Gone with the Wind, Daughters of the Dust, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and Sinners will be studied alongside literary works and relevant theoretical readings drawn from Southern studies, ecocriticism, environmental humanities, critical race studies, Gothic studies, and cultural studies. Through these interdisciplinary pairings, students will examine how literature and film participate in constructing‚--and continually reconstructing--what we understand as nature and the South.