Queering Southern Literature

Schedule of Readings

Winter Term 2000-Oberlin College

Week 1 (Friday, Jan. 7): Background in southern literature, LGBT history in the American South

"Out of Silence" (1998) by Jim Grimsley
 
"The Contemporary Southern Writer and the Tradition," from The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World, by Fred Hobson, Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures No. 33 (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1991).
 
"Queering the South: Constructions of Southern/Queer Identity," by Donna Jo Smith, from Carryin' On in the Lesbian and Gay South, ed. by John Howard (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997).
 
Stuck Rubber Baby (1995) by Howard Cruse

Week 2 (Tues., Jan 11 and Thurs., Jan. 13): Texts from the Southern Literary Renascence

"The Ballad of the Sad Café" (1938) by Carson McCullers
Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) by Truman Capote
Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) by Rita Mae Brown

Week 3(Tues., Jan. 18 and Thurs., Jan 20): Women's texts

Cavedweller (1998) by Dorothy Allison
The Revolution of Little Girls (1991) by Blanche McCrary Boyd
Memoir of a Race Traitor (1994) by Mab Segrest

Week 4 (Tues., Jan. 25 and Thurs., Jan. 27): Men's texts

White People (1990) by Alan Gurganis
Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992) by Randall Kenan
Dream Boy (1995) by Jim Grimsley

[Week 5: Discuss final reflections?]

All of the readings can be ordered online from Amazon.com, although you may get better prices in a used bookstore or through BookFinder.com. Many may also be available through our library or through OhioLink. To order Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby see the NextPlanetOver Website: http://www.nextplanetover.com/goods/products.asp?mscssid=DUVKV5J7GVS12J9W00AKHEAHCMVC3VC4&product=2435

last updated 16 December 1999 //send comments to Jan.Cooper@oberlin.edu