Southern Grotesque

1 credits · Undergraduate

This course will reckon with representations of the region of the U.S. that, as William Faulkner describes in Absalom, Absalom!, has been 'dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts.' The historical lens of slavery produces a condition of grotesquerie that itself has blossomed into fields of insanity. Our tour of the South will seek these out, focusing in on the unsavory, haunted and peculiar figures we meet along the way. Our syllabus will be populated by works that offer distorted visions of Southern life, history and culture. We will consider depictions of the South in fiction (novels, plays and short stories), music (country, blues, bluegrass, gospel), film and television.