Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Investigates interconnections between literature and popular culture through a variety of texts. The course will vary according to theoretical and critical approach, selection of media, and geographical and historical focus.

COURSE DETAILS:

The recent (post-1980s) celebrations of “southern food” are the latest in a long line of attempts to posit a distinctive “southern culture” or “southern identity” in opposition to an allegedly inferior U.S. national or “Northern” culture.  This course asks several fundamental questions about this enterprise: Why on Earth do some people feel the need to do this?  What are the ethics and politics of doing so?  What’s at stake?  We’ll read landmarks in the Agrarian tradition (which is so much about overcompensating for shame) out of which popular foodways discourse so obviously springs—including John C. Calhoun’s 1837 speech “Slavery a Positive Good”; selections from the 1930 Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand and from Louis D. Rubin’s 1962 introduction to its reissue; and selections from the 1989 Enyclopedia of Southern Culture—as well as lesser-known critiques of their arguments by such major American Studies scholars as Henry Nash Smith and Werner Sollors.  With a firm grounding in the dominant discourses celebrating “southern exceptionalism,” we’ll then turn to the contemporary “southern foodways” discourses that arise out of that model, especially the popularizing work of John Egerton and John T. Edge.  We’ll look at critiques of that model.  And we’ll look at a number of southern cookbooks, to see how agrarian themes continue in an age when they’re supposed to be long gone from southern studies.  Finally, we’ll look at echoes and modifications of agrarian thought in Black foodways talk from Edna Lewis to Michael Twitty.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: