THE AMERICAN SOUTH ESSAY 2
Essay length: 1,500-2,000 words
Essay criteria: With reference to TWO primary texts, please answer one of the following
questions. Your answer should be supported by secondary reading in order to provide
relevant critical, cultural, social, and historical contexts.
2. Discuss the importance of the family and family values in recent Southern literature.
3. Does recent Southern literature suggest that the gender roles found in the literature
of the “Old” and emerging “New South” have been called into question?
4. According to the recent Southern literature, has the region lost its distinctiveness?
5. To what extent has recent Southern literature called into question the dominant
ideologies of the South?
6. Discuss the role that trauma plays in recent Southern literature.
7. Why is memory (personal, collective, historical) so central to the Southern identity
articulated by recent Southern literature?
8. Discuss the significance of the way that the Southern poor are represented in recent
Southern literature.
11. Discuss the significance of the idea of heritage found in recent Southern literature.
12. Discuss the ways in which, according to recent Southern fiction, Southern experience
and identity can only be understood by placing the South in a national and/or
international context.
CHOOSE TEXT FROM THE FOLLOWING :
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God:
Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland
Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina
Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones