- SPRING 2008
- Dr. Mary Wearn
- T-TH 2:00-3:15
Through the study of art, literature, film, and popular culture, this course will explore how the idea of “motherhood” has been historically constructed in the United States. Foregrounding study in the matrifocal nineteenth century, we will examine the origins of the “American Madonna” and explore how she has haunted the American imagination since the antebellum period. This course will also consider writers and thinkers who willfully resist the idealization of motherhood and who present an alternative maternal discourse that more fully expresses the complex experience of women who are mothers.
HUMN 4472: Studies in Culture
- SUMMER 2007
- Topic: The American West
- Dr. Amy Berke
- MW 12:30 - 2:50; H/SS122
The course will focus on the American West as represented in film and literature, looking particularly at the West as a regional culture, at times raised to a mythical level. While the West has typically been viewed as the land of cowboys and outlaws, the course will examine the diverse populations that lived and interacted within this region, including Native Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans. The course will look at a number of associated topics through the eyes of literature and film, including the mythology of the Wild West, westward expansion and the introduction of the railroad, the American cowboy, women in the West, Native American displacement, contributions of African Americans and Hispanics to Western history and culture, the Gold Rush, and the emergence of West Coast cultural centers such as San Francisco in the 1890s. The course will end by taking a look at trends today toward demystifying the West, particularly in the film Unforgiven by Clint Eastwood and in the story “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx.
ENGL 3999: Dixie Chicks: Contempoary Southern Women Writers
- FALL 2007
- Dr. Sharon Colley
- Tuesday/Thursday 12:30-1:45 PM
- H/SS 122
No, this class will not be about the band!
Instead, we’ll explore some of the most entertaining and challenging fiction written by Southern women writers since the late 1960s. These women came of age during or since the end of segregation and the beginning of the women’s rights movement and offer unique insights into an “age of transition,” as one critic states.
Together, we’ll consider questions such as:
Where, exactly, is the South? Does it include Texas? How about Florida? Appalachia?
What does it mean to be a Southerner—particularly a Southern author—today?
How do issues of race and gender shape our experience of the contemporary South?
What issues and themes fascinate, worry, and intrigue contemporary Southern women writers?
How are these writers similar to the Southern writers that go before them? How are they different?
Where is Southern literature headed in the next century?
We’ll examine the work of a variety of today’s finest authors, such as: Jill McCorkle, Alice Walker, Lee Smith, Tayari Jones, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jayne Anne Phillips, and many more!
NOTE: If you’re looking for a course in Faulkner or Scarlett O’Hara, this is not for you!
Beyond Gone with the Wind—this is Dixie Chicks!