The Rage to Explain: Describing the South in the Generation Before Civil Rights

This course will consider narrative descriptions and analyses of the South as a distinct region of the United States from roughly 1925‐1954. How did southerners own interpretations, critiques, and imaginings of their exceptional character set the stage for and/or encourage or resist the large scale social and political transformations of 1954‐1963? A common interpretation of the Civil Rights movement is that a national perception of the south as a region distinct in mores, values, and tradtions helped to create political consensus for the need for federal action in guaranteeing the civil and political rights of African Americans.

Moreover, Richard King has argued that the period of 1930‐1950 constitutes a major "Southern Renaissance" important in the overall context of 20th century American cultural history in its own right. We'll spend time looking most directly at fiction, memoir, journalism, and cultural apologia, but there is much to be said about poetry, film, music, drama, and folk culture too. How is it that the region's intellectual class can simultaneously extend a narrative tradition distinct in its reliance on folk tropes, primal family dramas, and the complexity of the African inheritance, and often feel urgent in the dismissal of that cultural particularity as a barrier to progress and change?

Thoughtful reflection on this historical puzzle should bring us to a place where we can reflect on the contemporary valence of the South as distinct region. When more than half of freshman students at UA are from out of state, and when "blue state/red state" political analysis highlights rich differences between "central" and "coastal" cultures, does the South continue to occupy a central place in the national imagination? When NASCAR goes to California ‐‐ are we all Southerners now?

We'll begin with a careful look at the cultural impacts and meanings of the Scopes Trial (1925) and the Scottsboro, Alabama arrests (1931), and move through reading of a number of important narrations of the meanings of the South: Donald Davidson, et al, I'll Take My Stand (1930), Clarence Cason, 90 Degrees in the Shade (1935) James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), and W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941). We'll take on two biting memoirs of the period and region, Richard Wright's Black Boy (1945) and Lillian Smith's Killer of the Dream (1947), and we'll look at the cultural construction and shaping of two Hollywood films Gone With the Wind (1939) and Intruder in the Dust (1947). We'll finish up with a broader consideration of William Faulkner's influence on and in American culture, and do a reading of Faulkner's story "The Bear."