This course is an exploration of three works of literature from the American South: William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and Richard Wright’s Black Boy.
We will begin with a discussion of the Southern Renaissance, an American literary movement initiated by several Southern writers in the 1920s and ‘30s as a rejection of the romantic “moonlight and magnolias” tradition of the Lost Cause following the Civil War. Treating the sensitive and controversial subjects of race; the Southern plantation myth with its conservative feudal values; and the burden of history that traumatised the South after its defeat in the Civil War, the writers of the Southern Renaissance provided a critique of the failings of Southern society that was subversive of some of the South’s most deeply held values. At the same time, however, these authors were fascinated by the unique culture and tragic sensibility of the South, which stubbornly resisted the forces of modernisation that drove other parts of the United States into the 20th century.
We will examine the ways in which Faulkner, Williams, and Wright each participated in the birth of a new Southern literature that influenced the course of American letters in terms of both thematic and narratological concerns. The first class will introduce the cultural and historical context from which the Southern Renaissance sprang and will provide an overview of the writers typically considered a part of this movement. To set the stage for the discussion of Absalom, Absalom! in the second class, we will look at the biography of William Faulkner and the Modernist moment of which his first novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929) was a significant part. We will also briefly consider another work of Southern literature, which was published in 1936, the same year as Absalom. The novel was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, which, with its moonlight and magnolias romanticisation of antebellum Southern society, became one of the most popular novels ever published in English. The movie, which followed in 1939, likewise became one of the most popular films in film history. Absalom was in every respect the antithesis of its competing, and far more popular, peer. We will then move on to an exploration of concerns with time and narrative structures in the novel.
In the next class we will continue our discussion of Absalom, delving deeply into the complexities of race, the obsession with history, and the indigenous existential attitude evident in Faulkner’s text. We will move on in the fourth class to a discussion of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, a fictionalised autobiography that recounts Wright’s experiences as an African-American growing up on a Mississippi plantation before the Second World War. One of the idiosyncrasies of racial classification in American literature has been the tendency to identify only white writers as members of the Southern Renaissance and to consider literature by black writers as a separate category. We will discuss the reasons for this literary segregation and will analyse Wright’s novelistic memoir with an emphasis on the question of American racism - that of both the poor Southern agrarian society depicted, and of the intellectual literary elite that praised the book. We will also examine Wright’s profound criticism of the African-American culture from which he came, in addition to the white racism he suffered.
Finally, we will turn in the final class to Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, one of the most critically acclaimed and popularly admired plays in 20th century American dramaturgy. Williams’ play to some extent offers the most delicate treatment of the South among the texts we will consider in this course. Streetcar is not concerned with racial dynamics in the South, but rather with the fragility of the chivalric ideals of the Old South and the psychological conflict that manifests between the tragic, romantic Blanche DuBois and the brutal, pragmatic Stanley Kowalski.
We will conclude this class with some final thoughts on the significance of the Southern Renaissance and the legacy of these three writers in the American literary canon.