ENGL 2025 Chapter : Engl 2025 Grit Lit Fall 2014
Document Summary
The particular focus of this class will involve selected readings of literature from the american. More specifically we will tackle works of southern writing that have been described as grotesque. The term grotesque in southern literature "conjures up the strange worlds of freakish outsiders placed in lovelorn barren landscapes, penetrating heat, and closed spaces, with themes of miscegenation, sexual deviance and bloody violence. Perhaps not surprisingly, critical readers have, on the whole, concurred that the southern grotesque aligns itself with a gloomy vision of modernity, according to which the soul of man is both aimless and loveless. The grotesque worlds of southern literature, it is argued, allegorize the human condition itself as existential alienation and angst. In my view, however, these accounts of the southern grotesque do not tally with the type of art which (carson) mccullers describes in the prefatory quotation above, as well as in other essays and the fiction itself. "
