Course Schedule and Catalog

Long Title: WRITING NEW ORLEANS—THE CITY AS MUSE

Department: English

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Language of Instruction: Taught in English

Course Type: Seminar

Distribution Group: Distribution Group I

Credit Hours: 3

Description: New Orleans holds an extraordinary attraction for virtually all writers who embrace it as a setting. We will explore that fascination in a wide-ranging sample of writing by such authors as Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, John Kennedy Toole, Michael Ondaatje, Sarah Broom, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Eric Nguyen, and others. We will try to understand some of the many ways in which these writers have used this mysterious, complex, and magnetic place, striving to explain its survival despite and in some cases because of the social, legal, cultural, and environmental storms that have battered it. Our reading will be balanced between texts long ago admitted to the canon of classic American literature (Streetcar Named Desire, A Confederacy of Dunces) and texts that are part of a recent remarkable outburst of creative energy associated with the post-Katrina city (Ruffin’s short stories; Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House). The food, drink, and music of New Orleans will receive special attention as key parts of the city’s cultural fabric. A final paper will ask you to write your own New Orleans: to build a verbal monument from the foundations of these other attempts to capture the city’s essence in words.