[Here follow the introductory paragraphs of a paper presented at the CEA Conference, Baltimore, MD, Apr 3-5, 1997, for the Panel: Teaching the Literatures of the U.S., and the course syllabus.]

I notice that all our paper titles refer to place--region, territory, suburbia-- suggesting the importance of some environment related to the origin of a work of literature. Eudora Welty calls place "one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of fiction, perhaps the one that gazes benignly enough from off to one side, while others, like character, plot, symbolic meaning, and so on, are doing a good deal of wing-beating about her chairY."  By its very nature, Welty says, "fiction is all bound up in the local...; [it] depends for its life on place... [which] has a more lasting identity than we have...; [it is the] texture through which...feeling and meaning.., show throughY.Thus, place has a good deal to do with making the characters real, that is, themselves, and keeping them so,... [because] it is our describable outside that defines us, willy-nilly, to others, that may save us, or destroy us, in the world; it may be our shield against chaos, our mask against exposure; but whatever it is, the move we make in the place we live has to signify our intent and meaning" (Eye of the Story 116-22).

Yet writers do not always write about their own places of origin, as Welty well knows:  "It may be the stranger within the gates," she says, "whose eye is smitten by the crucial thing, the essence of life, the moment or act in our long-familiar midst that will forever define it. The inhabitant who has taken his fill of place and gone away may look back and see it for good, from afar, still there in his mind's eye like a city over the hill" (130). We know, of course that American expatriates like Hemingway did sometimes write from afar, as did Faulkner and Welty herself.

Welty's remarks were in my mind last year as I prepared to teach a senior seminar I called "Voices of the Modern South." As I made clear in the syllabus for the course, I wanted to explore the meanings of "South," "Southern literature," and "Southern writer" in terms of place as geographical region of fictional setting, and in terms of birthplace, and/or writing residence of author. But I also wanted to explore the meaning of these southern designations as they might imply a state of mind, perhaps an attitude that might manifest itself differently according to a writer's race, class, gender, and generation. I wanted to examine the idea that regional places associated with the author and the work had something to do with the voices we hear in the fiction: not to identify an author as regional, in the reductionist sense of that term, but to see the extent to which a work's integrity was tied to place and to compare earlier, and perhaps more traditional, Southern writers with those now said to represent the New South that is more like the rest of the country in outlook, concerns, and expression.

Since I wanted the "Voices of the Modern South" course to examine the various ways the literature spoke with a southern attitude and voice, I began by asking how my eight students in this seminar viewed themselves in relation to the region of their upbringing. One course handout was the "Survey About Culture and Geography in the South," which includes a blank map of the United States and questions about what characteristics the students considered Southern, Northern, or American.  Another handout was the result of that survey: it shows how many of them had always thought of certain states as part of "the South." (One thing I found out was that some did not know geography very well.) The source for this survey is a book by John Shelton Reed, Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, entitled My Tears Spoiled My Aim and Other Reflections on Southern Culture (1993; rpr. New York: Harvest/Harcourt, 1994). My class provided a very small sample for such a survey, but it served the purpose of the course. I found it interesting that two of the eight did not think of themselves in terms of a region. They all had opinions about characteristics, however; and more opinions were associated with the South than with the North, or with things American.  For example, they perceived conservatism and the importance of family as both particularly Southern and also American, but not Northern; and they thought that being concerned with money and being rude and aloof was both particularly Northern and also American. Obviously, logic was not at issue here.

I proposed several regions of the South to consider in the course:

I also designated a "region of the mind" called Vietnam, which constituted a part of the voices of several works from more than one geographical region.

Since the course dealt with both Modern and Contemporary literature, that is, anything written after about 1920, I began by pointing out that Modernism included the movement called the Southern Renaissance--or Renascence, as those classically educated Vanderbilt Fugitives liked to name it. It was during this time, as you may know, that a cultural shift in the South resulted in an impressive number of innovative writers from that region whose work overturned the previous critical appraisal of the entire South as what H. L. Mencken called a backward "Sahara of the Bozart." To emphasize just how far these works had come from the earlier, mostly sentimental, literature, at the first class meeting I used a handout (which you also have) that contrasted "The Dark Night of Southern Literature" with the intellectual awakening of the South.

Beginning with the Southern Renaissance, several tensions have energized Southern literature: one is that between writers' responses to the South and to the world outside the South; and another, which is closely related to the first, is that between the tradition-bound community and the self-aware, perhaps alienated, modern individual. Nothing illustrates both those tensions better than Welty's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Optimist's Daughter, in which a young widow, Laurel McKelva Hand, a fashion designer living in Chicago, returns to the South to attend her dying father. She must come to terms with his recent marriage to Wanda Fay, a young, crude second wife, and with the New South Fay represents, which seems the very antithesis of the genteel South of Laurel's upbringing. When her father dies soon after surgery, Laurel must cope with his death and with the idealized memories of both her parents and their marriage, with the memory of her husband, who died in the war, and their own short marriage, and with the cultural myth of the genteel South, all of which have held her in an emotional limbo. The novel is about what breaks the glass coffin in which this sleeping southern beauty has encased herself and how she deals with the shocking air of reality when she emerges.

The Optimist’s Daughter is in some ways, then, a parable of the South's emergence….

Voices of the Modern South:  A Seminar in American Literature

I.   BRIEF COURSE DESCRIPTION:
This course will examine novels and short stories of the modern and contemporary American South.  The course will consist of four units, covering the literature of four separate geographical "Souths":  the region traditionally known as the "Deep South," the Tidewater and South Atlantic states, the Mountain states, and the area that will be called, for the purpose of this course, "South by Southwest."

II.  COURSE GOALS:

III.  SYNOPSIS:
 The course aims (1) to examine the themes and styles of novels and short stories in terms of regional culture, American culture, and relevant intellectual and literary movements, and (2) to trace the development of Southern fiction from its modernist precedents to its most contemporary concerns and its narrative techniques.

The course begins with the American modernists, such as Faulkner, who began publishing after World War I, between 1920 and 1950, the period known as the Southern Renascence (or Renaissance), when a cultural shift in the South resulted in an impressive number of innovative writers whose work overturned the previous critical appraisal of the entire South as a backward "Sahara of the Bozart," as H. L. Mencken called it.  Students will examine the effect on Southern literature of European modernists, such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce.  They will observe the extent to which major themes in the mainstream of American literature, such as alienation and the American Dream, coexist with and are modified by themes unique to the literature of the various "Souths."

Students will observe in the literature important tensions between the often confining power of memory and the nostalgia for a rural, community-oriented, traditional, uniquely regional culture and the pressures of progress in a developing modern economy that is moving toward a more national culture.