AML 4213 Kilgore Fall 2021

How does Florida (especially Tallahassee) choose to preserve, narrate, and commemorate its early history through museums, memorials, monuments, and other historical sites? What does Mission San Luis say—or not say—about Spanish colonization of the area, the Goodwood Museum about plantation slavery? How are the Indigenous nations of Florida represented at the Museum of Florida History? And more to the point for this class, how does the literary archive of Florida open up or reveal perspectives on Florida history and culture that the above places fail to consider? This course will tackle timely questions such as these by surveying the early literature of Florida from the period of first nations through the nineteenth century, and then putting our reading into conversation with sites of public memory in and around Tallahassee. We will analyze the material rhetorics of history and place, and discuss the political, cultural, and literary legacy of Florida, yesterday and today. Our goal will be to explore old Florida literature as itself a form of cultural memory that shapes both the history and imagination of the state; conversely, we will approach sites of public memory as narrative forms which tell stories about Florida at the intersection of fact and fancy, history and myth.