A Trio of Southern Voices: Three Southern Women Writers

This course explores the rich and complex world of the American South through the mostly short fiction of three of its most influential women writers: Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Zora Neale Hurston. We will examine how Welty captures the quiet dramas of everyday life, how O’Connor blends the grotesque with the spiritual, and how Hurston brings folklore, dialect, and Black Southern experience to life. Students will examine the ways these writers use setting, voice, irony, and symbolism to portray a South marked by contradictions—beautiful and brutal as well as sacred and strange. Readings of short stories will include O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.” Instead of her shorter works, we will read Hurston’s masterwork, Their Eyes Were Watching God. This will be a discussion class.

Required Reading: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, Mariner Books Classics, ISBN 978-1328625649; The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor, various publishers; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, ISBN 978-0060916503. (Used books can be found online or at local stores.)

Michele Lettiere is a graduate of Bates College, with an M.A. from The Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. She spent over 40 years teaching English and Theatre to high school students, principally at Waynflete School in Portland.