Recent Graduate Seminars

Spring 2008: English 560: Towards a Global South

Course: This course approaches US southern literary and cultural study from a hemispheric, rather than nation-based, perspective. Described by many as "the American Mediterranean," the US South in some ways had more in common with its southern than its northern neighbors. The course explores the literary history of this multi-layered gateway between North and Central America. At its most fundamental, the course asks what critical opportunities open up if we rethink the idea that the US South ends at the Gulf of Mexico. Focusing on 19th-century debates about slavery, emancipation, citizenship, and corporate capitalism, the course reads a number of 19thc and 20thc texts in order to ask: where is “the South,” what is its assumed northern reference point; is there more than one South etc. We will see how the US South emerges as a liminal and unbordered space not only during the antebellum era but also during Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction periods.