HIST 560

Southern Literature and Oral Tradition

William Ferris

This course focuses on Southern writers and explores how they use oral traditions in their work. We will discuss the nature of oral tradition and how its study can provide a methodology for understanding Southern literature.  We will consider how specific folklore genres such as folktales, sermons, and music are used by Southern writers, and we will discuss how such genres provide structure for literary forms such as the novel and the short story. 

The seminar begins by exploring the nature of folklore and how its study has been applied to both oral and written literature.  We will then consider examples of oral history and how they capture the southern voice.  We will discuss how nineteenth century slave narratives by Harriet Ann Jacobs and Frederick Douglass and works by Tennessee Williams and Mark Twain deal with local color and black and white southern voices.  After these readings, we will consider a rich selection of twentieth century Southern writers and discuss how they use folklore in their work. 

Texts:

The following texts for the class are available at Student Stores:

• Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man
• Walker Evans and James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
• William Faulkner, The Hamlet
• William Ferris, Mule Trader: Ray Lum's Tales of Horses, Mules and Men
• Ernest Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
• Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men
• Randall Kenan, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead
• Theodore Rosengarten, All God's Dangers
• Lee Smith, Oral History
• Elizabeth Spencer, The Light in the Piazza and other Italian Tales
• Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Alice Walker, The Color Purple
• Eudora Welty, Selected Stories
• Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• Richard Wright, Native Son

Course Requirements: 

Each student will choose a writer and will present a 15-minute oral report that will include a dramatic reading of the writer’s work.   Students will also write a research paper that discusses how oral tradition is developed in the work of a Southern writer.  The length of the paper should be 12 pages for undergraduate students and 24 pages for graduate students and is due before the end of exams.  Final grades will be based on:  topic assignment (10%), working bibliography assignment (5%), the term paper (60%), class presentation (10%), and class participation (15%).