Consider, for example, the notion of southern. What do you think is essential to being southern? Where one is from?  The food one eats? One's accent?  The south is one of many interesting regions in the United States. But how do we define region and regionality? Geographically and physically, the south is identified as more or less contiguous with the "old Confederacy," the thirteen states that seceded during the Civil War. But culturally, the south is much harder to define. Not only is the defining characteristic of the south impossible to isolate (weather? history? accent?), but there are many "souths": Appalachia, the Delta, Cajun, Creole, Piedmont, Texan, and so forth. Perhaps David Smiley's comment offers a solution: 

"The American South is therefore not a place or a thing; it is not a collection of folkways or cultural distinctives. It is an idea. Those of whatever persuasion or tradition who believe themselves to be Southern are indeed Southern, and the South exists wherever Southerners form the predominant portion of the population." ["The Quest for the Central Theme in Southern History," The South Atlantic Quarterly 71:3 (1972): 307-325.]

The second term is "women"--the "other gender." In nearly every culture we know, and certainly in our own, women represent an alternative to the dominant male figure. Women or femininity are not the default, as it were, but the other, whatever is different. The reasons for this lesser status are much debated, but when we read or study women, we cannot fail to recognize this alterity and try to appreciate the consquences, both positive and negative, for occupying this particular space in human life and culture. How are women different? What difference does that difference make in the study of literature? in the study of southern literature?

And finally there is writing, the way that we, on the one hand, inscribe ourselves into the culture--how we express ourselves--and on the other, the medium by which we are inscribed into a culture: everything from laws and customs to sacred texts and novels "write" onto us, tell us how we are to act and be in a specific culture. How might women write themselves? How might southerners write any differently than anyone else? What might be the relationship between writing and women? between southernness and writing?

Post on the Discussion Board your initial responses to these issues and perhaps something about what you expect from a course focussed on southern women writers.

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