This first-year seminar will explore how southern literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries asks you to think about sexuality in both broad terms and regionally-specific contexts. The seminar will: give you a useful critical vocabulary about sexuality; allow you to see how regional and sexual identities are potentially mutually constitutive; ideally complement your lived experiences, especially now, when you are negotiating your sexualities and regional identities in new or newly complicated ways at the beginning of college; introduce you to the ways that literature is a central cultural mode for handling the complexities of sexuality; and, perhaps most exciting, expose you to a range of amazing southern texts, including novels such as James Dickey’s Deliverance and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina; short stories by Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, and Randall Kenan; and plays such as Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
This FSEM counts as an Honors-designated class.