Ideas for Final Project (prospectus due no later than Th, March 3)

All final seminar papers should be at least 20 pages in length, double-spaced, excluding bibliography (in proper MLA format using the 5th edition). I will deduct mightily for careless errors in proofreading and grammar. Write early, read aloud, show me drafts, and assume that you are going to submit your work to an editor for possible publication.

The paper must be thoroughly researched; you are expected to draw upon primary and secondary sources in crafting it. Use other scholarly articles as a basis for deciding "how much is enough." You need to delve into the stacks at Boatwright and perhaps UVA to cover this topic in ample depth. I can arrange a trip to Charlottesville one Saturday, if enough interest exists; the materials at Special Collection and in the Alderman's stacks are unmatched in this area. No more than one-quarter of your critical sources may be online. Of course, if you cite from Spirit of the Southern Frontier or other online archives, many of your primary sources will be electronic.

I hope to ask one or two of you who write the strongest essays to revise them for publication at the Spirit site after the seminar ends. I may encourage you to submit papers to outside publications as well. With that in mind, remember that your audience is potentially larger than me!

Prospectus: I will have to approve all topics in advance. I want you to create a critical question worth consideration in a paper of this length and submit it, along with a one-page description of your topic and a partial bibliography, annotated with a quick summary of each source and a critical assessment of its usefulness.These prospectuses are due to me no latter than Thursday, March 3. They will be graded.

Suggested Starting-Points for sources (including The Making of America)
Notes for using archival materials

Starting Points for Topics:

You are welcome to adopt or adapt any of the topics below, but they are mere suggestions that might get you to consider a similarly detailed topic of your own.

1) Choose a postwar Southern writer other than Faulkner or Mark Twain, and consider how an element of the tradition of Southern humor works its way into that writer's body of work. For example, we will discuss in class how the characters of the King and the Duke in Huck Finn come straight from incidents in the works of Hooper and Harris. For your part, you might consider a topic such as:

  • how a writer/storyteller such as Manly Wade Wellman, Kathryn Windham, or Bailey White adopts the conventions of Southern frontier humor, such as comic exaggeration, in their stories
  • how Zora Neale Hurston uses an aspect of African-American folk humor (see her Mules and Men and the comedy Mule Bone, co-written with Langston Hughes) in her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God, and look to humor by the Antebellum white humorists for points of contrast
  • how Toole or a contemporary uses irony or the picaresque. For instance, you might choose to contrast Ellison's and Johnson's use of educated black characters in picaresque tales.

Whatever direction you take, you should draw explicit connections to the work of the Southwestern humorists we read, and works by them we did not.

2) Explore in detail a connection or critical difference between Southern Frontier humor and the work of a writer from outside the region or tradition, such as:

  • one of the "local color" writers of the 19th Century whose humor tends to be subsumed by a more sentimental perspective about their regions
  • a more recent writer, such as James Thurber, Philip Roth, Barbara Kingsolver, or Kurt Vonnegut
  • a tradition or convention of regional humor such as the work of Artemus Ward, Bret Harte, or Benjamin Franklin, that of popular British magazines such as Punch, The Tattler, and the Spectator, or an Australian writer or filmmaker interested in their nation's frontier society.

3) Explore the relationship between the materials we have studied and the cultural history of the South, perhaps including the work of other writers we did not study in detail during the seminar.

You might wish to consider Kristin Whitesides' "Pugnacity, Power, Prurience and Greed: Preachers from the Frontier to the Television," or Valerie Hardy's "The Genteel Humorist and the Journalist of the American Frontier," written in 2001 for this seminar and revised for republication at the Spirit site.

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