Beginning our discussion on Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"

Agenda:

1. Please form groups of 4 and share annotations done over the weekend with your peers
2. Come together and discuss text as a class


From wikipedia:
Southern Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction unique to American literature that takes place exclusively in the American South.
Common themes in Southern Gothic literature include deeply flawed, disturbing or eccentric characters who may or may not dabble in hoodoo,^[1] ambivalent gender roles and decayed or derelict settings,^[2]grotesque situations, and other sinister events relating to or coming from poverty, alienation, racism, crime, and violence.
The southern Gothic style is one that employs the use of macabre, ironic events to examine the values of the American South.^[5] Thus unlike its parent genre, it uses the gothic tools not solely for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South - Gothic elements taking place in a magic realist context rather than a strictly fantastical one.
Warped rural communities replaced the sinister plantations of an earlier age; and in the works of leading figures such as William Faulkner, Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor, the representation of the South blossomed into an absurdist critique of modernity as a whole.^[6]


3. For homework read Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find"