Almost from the beginning Southerners have seen themselves as living in a particular region. The South of Southern imagination was created by geography, climate, the institution of slavery, an agrarian economy, evangelical religion, a sense of place and the past, and by literature. Mark Twain would add Sir Walter Scott to this list of influences. He thought that Sir Walter set the world in love with "dreams and phantoms of decayed religion and degraded systems of government, . . . sham gauds and sham glories of the Middle-Age sham civilization." He said that Walter Scott "did more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote." Most of the world, Twain wrote, had outlived a good part of these harms; "but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still." Without the "Sir Walter Scott disease" of "wordy, windy, sentimentality" the South would be a full generation more advanced than it is, he thought. In the South, Twain said, "authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language." This was in 1883.

Even in Twain’s own time, as he admitted, there were exceptions to his criticism of Southern writers. Though Sir Walter’s influence faded away soon enough, other influences continued to define Southern writing as it came to compete successfully for a fair share of the modern literary market. This Chautauqua will explore the forces that make for "Southern writing."

Place is probably the first of these. As Eudora Welty has written: "Place absorbs our earliest notice and attention, it bestows on us our original awareness; and our critical powers spring up from the study of it and the growth of experience inside it." The powerful sense of place in Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, his sense of Altamont/Asheville as "the centre of the earth, the small but dynamic core of all life," seems to confirm Welty’s judgement. So does Faulkner’s description of Yoknapatawpha County as "a kind of keystone in the universe [which] if ever taken away, the universe itself would collapse." We would like to explore, together with our audiences, what it is about places in the Southern landscape that are so important to the formation of our identity. We anticipate that when each of the authors addresses his or her sense of place listeners will recall similar places (or perhaps very dissimilar places) in their own memories–places that evoke strong feelings of who they are. Zora Neale Hurston, for example, would know the meaning of place as frequently restrictive–as in the phrase "knowing one’s place." For Katherine Anne Porter, born and raised a Texan but deeply influenced by her family’s former home in Kentucky, the morality of the deep South occupies her work, particularly in the collection The Old Order. In these stories she critiques the love of pleasure and indolence that characterized the wealthy South of plantations, horse-racing, and spoiled young men and women. Such complexities of the sense of place are one of the issues we would like to illustrate in this project.

The complex created by past times, by memory, by narrative, by family–all of which show up so powerfully in Southern culture--are all "undergirded," as Cleanth Brooks says, by religion. Brooks points to some sociological evidence but, knowing he has readers more impressed by literary insight, he also quotes Flannery O’Connor’s fine phrase that the South is "Christ haunted." Religion is an issue for the writers of this Chautauqua as it is for so many in the South. Even Mark Twain, famous for his irreverent unbelief, could not let go of God. His friend, William Dean Howells, rightly said that Clemens could not get over his Presbyterian upbringing. Even, perhaps especially, in his last works, Twain was haunted, if not by Christ, at least by God. His words nearly always lead audiences to raise religious questions and discuss religious and philosophical issues. Religion appears even in the titles of Zora Neale Hurston’s novels, Their Eyes Were Watching God and Moses: Man of the Mountain. Faulkner’s novel A Fable reenacts Christ’s Passion during World War I in France. The characters in all five Southern writers express religious belief or unbelief, and raise a whole set of significant issues which have an even longer history in the humanities than they do in the South. That history of religious and philosophical thought in the West can be used by the humanities scholars to help audiences think about religion in larger terms than most people are accustomed to.

The South has also been haunted by slavery and the Civil War and these ghosts turn up in Southern literature too. Mark Twain grew up in a slave-owning home. His father bought and rented and sold slaves. One of the slaves he sold, sold in fact "down the river," was Jennie, the woman who had come to Missouri with the family from Kentucky; she had also been the one to nurse little Sammy through his sickly infancy. With slave children his own age Sam Clemens was "in effect comrades" during the summers he spent on his Uncle John’s farm: "in effect comrades, because color and condition interposed a fine line that both parties were conscious of and that made complete fusion impossible," he added. Mark Twain’s work, and especially his "Mississippi Writings," are filled with black voices and characters from his youth. There is also in his writing a strong criticism of pre-War slavery and post-War racial oppression. The one contact Twain had with the Civil War occurred during the two weeks he was in the Confederate Army–a band of irregulars, really. He tells of this experience in a little memoir that tries to make light of his war experience at a time when old generals of the war were writing memoirs of their glorious exploits. Faulkner too wrote at length about race in the South. In Intruder in the Dust, a mystery about race relations he said: "white people in the South, before the North or the government or anyone else, owe and must pay a responsibility to the Negro." But his moderate liberalism on integration offended almost everyone. Zora Neale Hurston wrote about race both as an anthropologist and as a novelist.

This Chautauqua on Southern writers will examine the cultures of this complex region, the textures of landscape and memory, and engage the audience in discussions of the Southern character: does such a thing exist, and if so, from what sources did it develop and what is shaping it now?