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Discipline(s) : Anglais

Southern Studies II

Crédits ECTS 3
Volume horaire total 18h

Langue(s) d'enseignement

Libellé inconnu

Responsables

Pré-requis

Bon niveau d'anglais, notions d’histoire des États-Unis et de la littérature étatsunienne.

Objectifs

À travers la littérature du Sud des États-Unis, et plus largement les récits de différentes formes qui explorent cette zone traditionnellement  identifiée à la pratique de l'esclavage et aux épreuves successives qu'ont été la Guerre de Sécession et la Reconstruction, ce séminaire est l'occasion d'explorer ce que les arts du récit nous disent de l'identité d'une région. Plus largement, dans une perspective approfondie (celle du M2), il s'agit de faire le lien entre "American Literature, American Studies, and the World".

Les thématiques de ce séminaire évoluent tous les ans, dans la continuité d'une réflexion qui se mène au sein du CHCSC dans le réseau mondial des "Southern Studies".

Contenu

“Definitions Belong to the Definer” (Toni Morrison)
The South in print, voice and film.
If something can be said about the South, it maybe that it is as much told about as listened to. In the conclusion to his review of Taïna Tuhkunen’s ground-breaking book Demain sera un autre jour: le Sud et ses héroïnes à l’écran (Nuage Rouge, 2013), David Roche noted: “ l’héritage littéraire (les plantation novels et le Southern Gothic écrits par des sudistes) n’incite-t-il pas, dans une certaine mesure, à distinguer entre un cinéma régional (le cinéma sudiste) et un genre (hollywoodien) ? En effet, peu de cinéastes qui ont fait des southerns sont des sudistes (sauf Griffith et Pollard notamment). La question me semble importante quand il s’agit de s’interroger sur la dimension « construite », et souvent stéréotypée comme le montre Taïna Tuhkunen, de ce Sud. »
How does the South respond to this definition by the other ?
We shall start with Melville—not a Southerner, but “The Piazza” and “Bartleby” are two short pieces about the tyranny of definition and how individuals can feel crushed by them.
Blacks were especially likely to be “defined” down—and strategies of resistance became part of the culture that became an American standard, as Ralph Ellison has explained in a famous essay*. We could look at the popular character of Brer Rabbit, made popular by folklorist Joel Chandler Harris.
These themes open up to questions of colonialism and post-colonialism—and connected notions in a globalized world. The theme for  a second semester.
Works to be studied (provisional list):
-    William Faulkner “Red Leaves”
-    Toni Morrison, Beloved
-    Harper Lee To Kill a Mocking Bird
-    Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire and its film sequels (Elia Kazan, or Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, 2013)
-    John Sayles, Lone Star (film, 1998)
-    Bertrand Tavernier, Robert Parrish, Mississippi Blues (film, 1988)

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*‘Change the Joke and Skip the Yoke,’ in Partisan Review, Spring 1958. Rptd. in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 100-112.

Calendrier

Bâtiment Vauban, salle 610 (6e étage)
Vérifier détails, calendrier, mise à jour sur le site de l’IECI : recherche > séminaires.

Bibliographie

Uncertain about a research project? Some suggestions:

- Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936) famously played down the tragedy of slavery—but what did it mean to write such a book in the South that was suffering more than the rest of the nation from the depression? And from a woman’s point of view?
- Big Woods (1954) is a collection of short stories by William Faulkner about native Americans, compiled from various other collections and Go Down, Moses. It includes original material. Its construction has never been studied.
- In The Last Gentleman (1966) Walker Percy revisits Southern masculinity, still fragile after the defeat in the Civil War. A former PhD candidate wrte her dissertation on the subject of Southern masculinity that can also be applied to this novel.
- In Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1999), Janisse Ray remembered growing up in a wrecking yard in poor-white Appalachia, and its threatened environment. 
- Anthony Grooms remembered the bombing of a Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, during the Civil Rights struggle in his novel Bombingham (New York: Ballantine, 2001).
- James Lee Burke may be best known in France through the film adaptation of his novel In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (1993) by Bertrand Tavernier (2009), with Tommy Lee Jones as David Robicheaux. Among others, Burke also write a fine novel over the Katrina disaster, The Tin Roof Blowdown (2007).
- Cormac McCarthy needs no introduction—through No Country for Old Men (2005) he invites us to investigate the border region of the South-West and the sense of dislocation of these times.
- Alabama native Daniel Alarcón’s Lost City Radio (2007) is a good example of the latina literature in English—and also talks about contemporary rootlessness.
- In 2012, African American poet Natasha Trethewey (Bellocq’s Ophelia, 2002) became the nation’s poet laureate.

The clash between humdrum city life and the wildness of the mountain environment was explored in James Dickey’s Deliverance (Houghton Mifflin, 1970), also a cult film. In Oral History (Putnam, 1983), Lee Smith listened to the testimony of mountain people in the Appalachian—also the background of Ron Rash’s The World Made Straight (New York/ Holt, 2006).

- Toni Morrison brings together the trials of the war experience and the tensions of the South in the Civil Right movement in Home (New York: Knopf, 2012).

In room Vauban 610 the "Suds d'Amériques" collection holds the published volumes of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (University of North Carolina Press), with a wealth of ideas about various aspects of the Culture of the South--a good place to start with.

General Criticism: some recent titles

- Donaldson, Susan V., and Anne Goodwyn Jones, eds. Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1997(BU UVSQ).
- Ginés, Montserrat. The Southern inheritors of Don Quixote. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 2000. (BU UVSQ)
- Gray, Richard. Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problem of Regionalism. LSU, 2000.
- Gray, Richard John; Robinson, Owen. A companion to the literature and culture of the American south. Malden Mass. Oxford : Blackwell 2007. (BU UVSQ: 810.93 COM)
- Monteith, Sharon, and Suzanne Jones, eds. South to a New Place: Region, Literature, culture. Baton Rouge: LAUP, 2002.
- Taylor, William R. Cavalier and Yankee : the old south and American character. London : W. H. Allen, 1963. (BU UVSQ)
- Weinstein,Philip. The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press 1995 ; Becoming Faulkner: The Art and Life of William Faulkner. Oxford UP, 2010.
- Wilson, Charles Reagan, ed. New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, UNC Press. (Laboratoire Suds)
- Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2000.

Contrôles des connaissances

Les étudiants doivent être préparés à partir à la découverte d’œuvres dont ils auront à rendre compte en séminaire par des exposés. Un travail de synthèse est demandé en conclusion du semestre. Les étudiants de M2 devront en outre rédiger le compte-rendu d’un colloque ou d’une journée d’études auquel/ à laquelle ils auront choisi d’assister.

Informations complémentaires

Si la date de mise à jour de cette fiche est ancienne, merci de vous reporter au site de l’IECI, Recherche > séminaires, ou de m’écrire.