Writing the South

This two-quarter program combines history and creative writing to explore the myths and realities, the stories and the histories of the American South.

The American South looms largely in American writing, and its historical context continues to be rich subject matter to many writers and scholars today. Writers from or fascinated with the South have created some of the most important works in American literary fiction and American history. But, why, exactly, are there so many stories to tell about this region of the country? What can examination of historical documentation (both in fiction and non-fiction) tell us that paints a whole picture of the region so influential to American culture?

The American South is often conceptualized as the birthplace of most American culture, a pinnacle of American inequality and the strongest embodiment of systems of oppression, as well as—perhaps counter-intuitively—the birthplace of the values and practices that have critiqued those systems. Racism and civil rights, poverty and music, violence and soul food, slavery and freedom, cotton and blood: the historic themes of the South grapple with contradictions and suggest it is a region stuck in time yet constantly in change. The American South is not a monolith; it has not been just one thing.

This interdisciplinary program of literature and history will include intensive reading and writing. Assigned readings will include notable, canonical works of fiction and history as well as new, contemporary explorations. A central theme of these works will be the critique of monolithic storytelling, especially around narratives of race, class, and gender. We will explore the histories of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy alongside the histories of resistance, resilience, and success by people of color in the South, in particular Black and Indigenous southerners. We will also explore the histories of white southerners sympathetic to racial equality and interracial solidarity movements, as well as histories of women and queer and gender-non-conforming southerners.

As students strengthen skills in analyzing readings, assignments will allow students to write about the South themselves. Students will gain experience in different kinds of intensive reading, research, and writing practices, including first-hand, primary source research and learning how to analyze fictional writing, nonfiction historical narratives, and nonfiction historical analysis. We will examine the American South from European colonization through the present day. Students will be required to produce works of both historical fictional and historical analysis. In the spring quarter, students will complete a final capstone writing project, drawn from original research in primary sources, that will include both critical historical analysis as well as creative historical fiction.

Together we will grapple with what it means to be southern, ask what defines the South (geographically, culturally, and politically), and how to interrogate the effects of regional myths about the South on larger American popular culture. These questions are especially intriguing to ask here in Washington, a place outside of the South but home to many similar dichotomies of poverty and wealth, urban and rural communities, disparities between white people and people of color. This program will build upon skills and topics in the fall program “Forward/Freedom/Formation,” exploring the American Civil War, but that program is not a pre-requisite for enrollment in this program.

Anticipated Credit Equivalencies:

History: The American South, 1600-present

Creative Writing: Historical Fiction

American Studies