120020 SE Literary Seminar / BA-Arbeit / MA American/North American Lit./Studies (2010W)

The seminar will reflect on (unexpected) parallels and differences between rural and small town Canada and the American South in demographic, cultural and economic terms. It will further consider the multiple ways in which writers from these two large North American regions responded to the other sphere and to literary texts rooted in them.
In the seminar we will also analyze historic ties between the two regions which are, on the one hand, linked to the expulsion of the Acadiens from Nova Scotia and their settlements in future Louisiana (the Cajuns) and, on the other hand, related to the opposite movement taken by fugitive slaves in the Antebellum and reflected in life writings and popular fiction. This seminar will focus on the narrative art of distinguished Southern authors such as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty, who inspired younger Canadian writers such as Alice Munro, Jack Hodgins, and Aritha van Herk, and will also consider texts by authors who lived on both sides of the border.
Before the semester commences an international colloquium on the same topic will convene, in which international experts from nine countries will deal with shared experiences and intertextual links between these authors. Students participating in this seminar are invited to attend in order to benefit from the lectures and discussions by these leading intellectuals. (The colloquium will begin on September 24 at 2 p.m. in the Austrian Academy of Sciences and will be concluded on Campus on Sunday, September 26, after 2 p.m.)
A reader including excerpts from relevant texts will be compiled and should be available by the end of July. Students are encouraged to register early and use the vacations for doing research. A reserved shelf will be organized in the Departmental Library.