Regionalism The Realism of the South

How it started  Grass Roots movement: started from the people not in power and moved up  Quality based on number of books sold  Develops limited celebrity  More people write to get rich  Driven by audience not by writers.  Published in the magazines and periodicals

Features  Rural settings (Local Color)  Realism is the Urban North  Regionalism is in the Rural South  Local Color: Painting of the farming of the South  Landscape and people exoticized  People thought they were an odd bunch and a weird location  Readership not in the same class as the characters.  Fairy Tale Ideology:  Ideals made very clear  Characters almost over-the-top in their actions (Think Ugly Step Sisters in Cinderella).

Features  Use of dialect  Y’all comin’ back soon Ah hope!  Written to match phonetics (sounds) of spoken word  Attention to Diegesis:  A fictional world for the text to take place in.  Homodiegetic: first person (I, me etc.) where the character is a part of the narrative  Heterodiegetic: Keeping it at arms length. The Regionalists did this.  Narrative space  Person telling the story generally separated some how from the people of the story.  Laugh at characters, believe narrator

Zora Neale Hurston  Childhood  Born in Alabama  As a toddler, family moves to Eatonville Florida  All black town  Setting of her later stories  "a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse."  At age 13 mom dies: turns life around  Does not get along with stepmom  Runs away with a theater troupe

Zora Neale Hurston  After Graduation  Does graduate from college  Moves to Harlem, New York  Part of Harlem Renaissance- major cultural movement  Works on grants from the government during the depression  Writing:  Always celebrates blackness  Based in communities of all black people  Based in her own childhood  Records black culture  Voodoo to mystic  Folk culture important, folk dialect

William Faulkner  Born in the South  Rich family  Lived whole life in Mississippi  Growing up  Attended Ole Miss (a school with racial issues) but dropped out  Wanted to join military in US, but was too short, joined the British Air Force

William Faulkner  Writing  Set stories in Yoknapatawpha county  Poor Southern Whites (but he was not poor)  Many of his characters were backwards in their beliefs and morals  Known for his incredibly long and descriptive sentences  Other ventures:  Hollywood Screenwriter for the money  Fierce critic of others’ writing

Rap- The Local Color of Today?  Similarities:   Differences: 