Robert Rudnicki, Project Director

Office: (318) 257-3403

Home: (318) 513-1624

English Department: (318) 257-2718

Email: rrudnicki@garts.latech.edu

EXPEDITIONS IN LOUISIANA LITERATURE: FROM TRAVEL NARRATIVE TO THE NOVEL

A Summer 2003 Teacher Institute for Advanced Study made possible through a grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, hosted by Louisiana Tech University

ENROLLMENT BENEFITS HOW TO APPLY SCHEDULE DESCRIPTION TEXTS BIBLIOGRAPHY LINKS PROJECTS

OVERVIEW

Each year, the LEH funds approximately 11 Institutes for Advanced Study for junior and senior high school teachers whose subject areas may include literature, history, social studies, art, foreign languages, or other liberal arts. These intensive seminars are designed to enrich participants’ understanding and appreciation of the humanities subjects they teach by exploring innovative approaches to traditional core content. The Institutes encourage junior high, senior high, and university teachers of liberal arts subjects to work together in a comfortable and collegial atmosphere, studying texts and discussing course content in ways that lead to the design of practical lesson plans and potential writing projects.

This Institute will be organized around the concept of literary expeditions, an appropriate topic during the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase. The seminar will begin by considering expeditions in their specific sense of organized groups undertaking literal journeys that have clear objectives and work toward a larger and more inclusive definition of expeditions as aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical journeys represented in novels and other narratives. The primary readings for the seminar will offer different approaches to the concept of expeditions, encouraging the group to become its own “corps of discovery” as we explore ways that the pattern can be used in their literature, history, social studies or art lessons. We will begin by considering what the term expedition may have meant to a variety of figures such as Cabeza de Vaca, Iberville, Bienville, Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Claiborne by reading short passages from each writer. Because Louisiana exploration and settlement history of course begins well before 1803, a consideration of both the earlier narratives as well as those associated with the Purchase will help us develop a context for discussing when la Louisiane begins to take shape as the more familiar Louisiana participants know. Frank DeCaro’s collection of travel writings entitled Louisiana Sojourns will provide us with additional short weekly readings of other narrative varieties of Louisiana expeditions. After establishing this context, we will flash forward to the proliferation of belletristic prose writing in the state, specifically by studying a novel or collection of short fiction by four major writers who have lived in and written about Louisiana:

George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes
Kate Chopin, Bayou Folk & A Night in Acadie
Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
Ernest Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men

Read more about previous Teacher Institutes for Advanced Study

ENROLLMENT BENEFITS

By participating for approximately three hours a day (9-11:30/12), four days a week (Monday-Thursday), for four weeks (in June), you receive the following:

· $500.00 stipend for each teacher, minus the cost of your free books (about $67.00 plus tax)

· Free tuition

· Free on-campus housing (optional)

· Three hours of graduate credit

HOW TO APPLY

Those interested in participating should either email their application information (listed below) or complete the application form within the brochure and return it to me:

Application for EXPEDITIONS IN LOUISIANA LITERATURE

Name:____________________________________________________

Address:__________ City:______State: _____ Zip:____________

Home Phone:_________Work Phone:________Email:_______________

Teaching Experience:

School Dates Courses Taught

_________________________________________________________

Education:

Degree Institution Graduation Date Major/Minor

_________________________________________________________

Will you enroll for graduate credit? Yes_____ No ______

(Enrollment for graduate credit is not a requirement for participation in the Institute. Teachers who attend for enrichment only still receive the $500.00 stipend)

Have you attended an Institute in the past? Yes____ No ______

If yes, please provide the name, location and dates of the Institute(s) you attended.

What is your principal reason for attending this Institute?

_________________________________________________________

Applicants will be notified of their acceptance shortly after returning this information.

Brochures are available in an envelope attached to my office door (George T. Madison 250), in the English Department main office (GTM 236), in the Foreign Language Department office (GTM 223), or through the mail on request. If you do not email your information, please return the brochure to the following address:

Robert Rudnicki, Project Director

Teacher Institute for Advanced Study

Department of English

Louisiana Tech University

P.O. Box 3162

Ruston, LA 71272

Office: (318) 257-3403

Home: (318) 513-1624

English Department: (318) 257-2718

Email: rrudnicki@garts.latech.edu

Please do not hesitate to contact me to express your interest in participating or to ask for additional information!

SCHEDULE

Note: The Seminar will begin Monday, 2 June and conclude Thursday, 26 June. We will meet for approximately three hours a day (9-12), four days a week (Monday-Thursday), for four weeks. Please check this schedule again soon for final revisions or contact me for clarifications.

May 12, 4:30-5:00, GTM 215: Pre-Institute meeting (check in, overview of seminar, review syllabus and books)

Week One: Departures and Arrivals

Monday June 2:

Welcome, Introduction to Methods and Content, Discuss the Optional Paper Requirements

Handouts: Excerpts from Journal, Meriweather Lewis; “Letter to Compte de Pontchartrain,” De Ramonville; Journals, Iberville and Abbadie; “Letter to Robert Livingston,” Thomas Jefferson; Letterbook, W. C. C. Claiborne; “Posson’ Jone,” Cable

Tuesday June 3:

“South of the South”: Mapping Louisianan, Southern, and American Literary Traditions

Reading: LS (Louisiana Sojourns): Turner, “South of the South;”

Handout: Walker Percy, “Why I Live Where I Live”

Note: Films will often be shown in class to supplement our readings. Typical meetings might include an introduction to the day’s reading, group discussion, teaching possibilities, Internet source material reviews, and a film.

Wednesday June 4:

Literature of Expedition, Literature as Expedition: The Early Narratives

Reading: LS: de Vaca, “Discovering the Mississippi’s Mouth;” Metairie, “Vive le Roi: La Salle Reaches the Mississippi’s Mouth;” Trollope, “Entrance of the Mississippi”

Continue discussion of Monday’s handouts, develop teaching strategies

Thursday June 5:

George Washington Cable and the LA Purchase: Social Reform, Local Color, and Creole Patois

Reading: The Grandissimes

We will discuss Cable’s work and explore ways this novel could be used by literature and history teachers in their classrooms.

Week Two: Trials and Compromises

Monday June 9 and Tuesday June 10:

Kate Chopin before The Awakening: Literary Realism, Naturalism, and Gender in Fin de Siecle Louisiana

Reading: LS: Ripley, “A Visit to Valcour Aime Plantation;” Russell, “St. James Parish Plantations;” King, Magnolia Plantation;” Hesse-Wartegg, “Plantation Life in Southern Louisiana;” Jackson, “Grand Isle;” Chopin, “Sailing to Cheniere Caminada;” Robin, “The Acadian Coast;” Olmstead, “Acadians;” Fortier, “A Tour of the Acadian Country;” Kimbrough, “The Fais Do Do at Mamou;” Bayou Folk through “Desiree’s Baby;” A Night in Acadie through “A Dresden Lady in Dixie”

Wednesday June 11:

Chopin’s Southern American Context

Guest Speaker: Dr. Kelly Obernuefemann

Thursday June 12:

Developing Teaching Strategies and Teaching Literature to Film

Review Kate Chopin: “Multilinear Enhancements” (LPB Online)

Discuss classroom activities and approaches

Film: Kate Chopin: A Re-Awakening

Film: The Joy That Kills (60 minutes, Cypress)

Film: Kate Chopin’s Story of an Hour (24 minutes, Ishtar)

Week Three: Maps and (Mis?)Directions

Monday June 16 and Tuesday June 17:

Robert Penn Warren and the Awful Responsibility of Time: The Southern Renaissance, Politics, Pragmatism, and the Modern Dilemma

Reading: LS: Parker, “Crossing Central Louisiana;” Liebling, “Nothing But a Little Pissant;” Mark Twain, “Castles and Plantations”

Handouts: James, “What Pragmatism Means;” Warren, All the King’s Men, “Heart of Autumn,” “Bearded Oaks,” “Tell Me a Story,” “Mortal Limit”

Wednesday June 18:

Interpretations and Critical Approaches

Reading: All the King’s Men

Film: Huey Long (90 minutes, Ken Burns)

Film: Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long (Turner)

Film: Beyond Words: The Story of The Southern Review (30 minutes)

Thursday June 19:

Developing Teaching Strategies and Teaching Literature to Film

Reading: All the King’s Men

Film: Louisiana Boys: Raised on Politics (60 minutes)

Film: All the King’s Men (109 minutes, Columbia Tristar)

Week Four: Returns and Reclamations

Monday June 23 and Tuesday June 24:

Gaines and the Gathering of Voices: Cajun, Planter, and African-American Perspectives

Film: Ernest Gaines: Louisiana Stories (Interview / Biography, 60 minutes)

Reading: LS: Audubon, “The Runaway;” Robin, “Fear of a Slave Uprising;” Steinbeck, “The Cheerleaders;” “Anderson, “A Certain Meeting South;” Olmstead, “Free People of Color;” Bremer, “The Elements of True African Worship;” Warner, “A Voodoo Dance;” Hurston, “A Voodoo Initiation” Handouts: Gaines, “The Sky Is Gray;” Percy, “A Better Louisiana”

Film: The Sky Is Gray (47 minutes, LPB)

Wednesday June 25:

Expeditions within Us, Expeditions around Us: Folk Narratives, Sarah Albritton, Louisiana Voices, and Swapping Stories

Guest Speaker: Dr. Susan Roach

Reading and discussion of selected online narratives

Thursday June 26:

Concluding Discussion and Review, Optional Projects Due, Final Day “Party”

Film: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, or A Lesson Before Dying

Post-Institute Meeting: Monday 4:00, November 3

COMPLETE SEMINAR DESCRIPTION

One month before the Institute begins, participants will meet to discuss the format of the seminar and receive course materials and supplemental readings. We will discuss their familiarity with and interest in the primary texts, which will provide them with the opportunity to suggest alternate or additional topics to incorporate within the seminar. I will also mail questionnaires at this time to those interested in participating but who are unable to attend a pre-Institute meeting. This will offer them a voice as we determine final topics.

The Institute will meet three hours a day, five days a week, for four consecutive weeks, satisfying the requirement for a seminar at Louisiana Tech University. Teachers who complete the Institute will receive three hours graduate credit with tuition waived. Using the graduate seminar format and integrating traditional methods of presenting information such as lecture and discussion with interactive teaching aids, the seminar will be supported by a variety of media and approaches to course content. For the convenience of participants, I will develop a website devoted to the Institute’s topic which will duplicate all information delivered in hard copy and provide extensive links to background and contextual material. Once the Institute begins, participants will make daily contributions such as discussion questions, journal topics, and longer project ideas that I will collect and add to the website. I will continue to maintain this site during the following academic year for the benefit of participants who may be interested in organizing a unit of study on Louisiana literature during the bicentennial of the Purchase. Video interviews with or about Louisiana writers and film adaptations of their writings will be shown at the end of many meetings. We will also collaborate on presentations of each central writer, and I will burn a CD-R of these presentations and all other teaching material for each participant.

The resources needed to move fluidly from one instructional medium to another are centrally available in one of the department’s technology-fitted classrooms. The English department is located on the second floor of the George T. Madison building, where two of these classrooms are available. In addition, the university’s Honors Program seminar room is located on the first floor, where on occasion we will make use of their Smartboard technology and plasma screen. Given current teaching methods and the ways teachers and students present, process, and retain information today, delivering course content using a variety of approaches is one of the more effective methods of sustaining interest, encouraging interaction, and creating a learning atmosphere in which the free exchange of ideas leads to innovative classroom activities and assignments.

Three months after the Institute concludes, during their fall 2003 classes, I will distribute another questionnaire to participants to determine which texts, topics and approaches have been the most useful in their teaching. I will summarize this information in a concluding report and mail copies to those who responded.

The Institute will be organized around the concept of literary expeditions, an appropriate topic during the year of the Louisiana Purchase bicentennial. The group will begin by considering expeditions in their specific sense of organized groups undertaking literal journeys that have clear objectives and work toward a larger and more inclusive definition of expeditions as aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical journeys represented in novels and other narratives. The primary readings for the seminar will offer different approaches to the concept of expeditions, encouraging the group to become its own “corps of discovery” as we explore ways that the pattern can be used in their literature, history, social studies or art lessons.

The distance between what junior and senior high school students read and what they experience every day in their lives often seems vast to them. The gap between their writing interests and the writing they are presented can seem equally large. Ironically, we live in a state rich in narratives presented as literature, art, and history. Yet our younger, general populace, especially in largely rural North Louisiana, is growing by the year more a-historical, consumer-driven, and disenfranchised from the process of writing and the very narratives that in part define them. Students tell stories all the time, but they need more assistance seeing how their own stories are relevant to previous narrative patterns. In doing so, students will be instilled with a greater interest in humanistic study and Louisiana’s cultural heritage. Cutting across disciplines, working with teachers at different levels, tracing a concept as it develops and responds to different periods and cultures, and making concrete connections between “book-learnin’” (as Huck Finn might say) and contemporary experience are the most current methods for reaching these objectives. The Louisiana Purchase bicentennial is an excellent opportunity to work with teachers on this subject of expeditions, who in turn have the opportunity to inspire a younger and wider audience during crucial developmental years.

Moving historically from some of the earliest writings concerning French exploration, the Louisiana Purchase, the Territory of Orleans, 1812 statehood, and the Civil War, to representations of subsequent influences such as Reconstruction, the Southern Renaissance, the Civil Rights struggle, pervasive southern myths and motifs, political imbroglios, and modern culture, the seminar will reflect upon the ways the places and people of Louisiana have been imagined and inscribed, studying historical and literary reasons for particular representations. Another objective will be to gain a greater understanding of the ways Louisiana’s rich literary history is both distinct from as well as part and parcel of the larger tradition of American letters. Justifiably, the state is most often noted for its exoticism—a quality that has been celebrated and also exploited—but the narrative patterns that inform American literature writ large can be usefully applied to our regional locale.

We will begin by considering what the term expedition meant to a variety of figures such as Cabeza de Vaca, Iberville, Bienville, Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Claiborne by reading short selections from each writer. Because Louisiana exploration and settlement history of course begins well before 1803, a consideration of both the earlier narratives as well as those associated with the Purchase will help us develop a context for discussing when la Louisiane begins to take shape as the more familiar Louisiana participants know. I will suggest that we need to be familiar with narratives from both periods, because it was not until the expectations and frameworks of all colonists and settlers come into contact with one another that today’s Louisiana can be recognized. Beginning in this fashion will be useful in a number of ways:

We will define the course concept.
We will review the history of Louisiana’s exploration, settlement, and transfer to the United States.
We will analyze the rhetorical patterns, concerns, and interests of each selection to establish a nonfiction basis for the development of the literary tropes and traditions most often associated with the state’s rich narrative heritage.
We will begin to consider how this rich narrative heritage continues to inform the ways people represent and respond to Louisiana.

After establishing this context, we will flash forward to the proliferation of belletristic prose writing in the state, specifically by studying a novel or collection of short fiction by four major writers who have lived in and written about Louisiana: George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, Robert Penn Warren, and Ernest Gaines. Each of these writers was (or is) deeply concerned with the topic of expeditions, as I will outline in the subsequent Major Examples section. The flowering of the Belles Lettres in the South is commonly known as the Southern Renaissance, a period typically framed by the two World Wars, but prose fiction in Louisiana had firmly established itself as early as the 1880s, especially in the major figures of Cable and Chopin. Warren’s narrative presence in the state has long been iconic for the rest of the nation, while Gaines continues to prove himself as a craftsman with a history of producing steady, high-quality fiction. These four writers deserve more comprehensive study by participants. Cable, Chopin, Warren and Gaines treat the topic of expeditions through lenses of gender, race, politics, philosophy, and social history, among others. They produced fiction that remains relevant to current junior high and high school students, fiction that teachers will find adaptable to a variety of classroom approaches.

In addition to these four, at the request of participants I will introduce some of the many other writers associated with Louisiana, selecting among figures such as Percy, Toole, Hearn, Saxon, Bontemps, Dubus, Burke, Corrington, Gilchrist, Stuart, Butler, Crone, Grau, Lewis, Dufresne, and Gautreaux. The principle method of giving the Institute further continuity, however, will be to use Frank de Caro’s Louisiana Sojourns: Travelers’ Tales and Literary Journeys as a backdrop for our more focused and sustained discussions. In both approach and content, Louisiana Sojourns will add context and useful discussion topics to a seminar that examines Louisiana narratives—both nonfiction and belletristic—as travels, sojourns, and expeditions. Thus we will begin with brief selections from the journals and logs of early explorers and compare them to some of the later Lewis and Clark expedition entries as well as to selections from Claiborne’s Letterbook. After discussing the cultural myths and metaphors that these explorers and frontier settlers patterned for the new nation and for Louisiana in particular, we will make a natural shift to literature through Cable’s The Grandissimes, the first major reading on the schedule.

TEXTS

George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes (1879, 1880)

George Washington Cable was one of the most significant Southern writers between the Civil War and the first two decades of the twentieth century. Cable’s best longer work, The Grandissimes, will be the first major text for the seminar. Although first serialized in 1879, The Grandissimes is set during the period of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Louisiana Purchase, and impending statehood, making it the logical point of departure for a seminar organized around this topic. The novel also imaginatively frames many issues familiar to those who teach literature and history in Louisiana, such as racial divisions, ethnic complexity, social and economic caste, family tensions, and the rapid pace at which these and other conditions continue to change. Cable recognized that 1803 marked a cultural and ideological turning point for his state. One of the fundamental questions of the novel concerns Creole life and Southern society at large, a question that has clear relevance to the debate that was germinating over the way the Louisiana Territory would be governed: can any society call itself legitimate, much less democratic, if it is founded on an institution that sanctions human bondage? The essential dramatic tension in the novel is drawn from Honore Grandissime’s honest struggle to reconcile his uncle Agricole’s commandment to stand by the family and their traditions, right or wrong, with the moral absolutism of the newcomer Joseph Frowenfield, whose Enlightenment principles—he hails from Philadelphia—would destroy Creole society in order to reform it.

The novel also owes a great debt to Charles Gayarre’s History of Louisiana, as participants will see in the first several chapters which offer a fictional version of French and Spanish exploration and settlement by tracing the genealogy of the first Grandissimes in Louisiana and their rise to the plantation elite. A fictional Governor Claiborne, in fact, makes an infamous ride through New Orleans which marks the transition of power, if not yet allegiance. The novel also anticipates many of the issues and characters often associated with a more familiar Southern writer: William Faulkner. In Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, for example, Thomas Sutpen’s “grand design” falls to ruin due to a past transgression. The extent to which one may overcome past actions, the tension between family loyalty and personal conscience, and the democratic imperative for cultural and ethnic understanding are all content-intensive topics adaptable to many different teaching strategies and goals.

Kate Chopin, Bayou Folk & A Night in Acadie (1894, 1897)

Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie are the two collections of short fiction published during Kate Chopin’s lifetime. Her reputation, although never as strong as Cable’s during the 1880s, currently enjoys a national recognition and respect that overshadows her predecessor and fellow local colorist. Indeed, it will prove interesting to compare the conventions of Local Color to the styles and concerns of first Cable and then Chopin. If for the general, largely Northern, late nineteenth-century readership the South was a place imagined as peculiar and quaint, Louisiana was seen as sheer exotica. As Frederick Turner recently observed, Louisiana, particularly New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, even today remains “South of the South.” Cable and Chopin consciously mined the state’s culture for literary inspiration and shrewdly marketed their narratives for mass consumption to a national audience hungry for glimpses of different groups of people, modes of thinking, distinctive speech patterns, and unusual customs. Yet Cable and Chopin were both writers deeply interested in social realism and reform. Cable’s increasingly outspoken views on racial equality forced him to leave the South, while Chopin’s incisive commentary on gender inequities and prescriptive women’s roles later received a similar reaction. This apparent discrepancy between narrative as consumerism and narrative as social criticism will encourage a lively debate, especially in light of the ways Louisiana’s representations have in turn enlightened or even exploited various cultures and places for audiences. To what extent can a writer tell a story with a mind to sell a million copies while staying true to the people and places the story represents? May one be self-interested as well as an artist? Modern comparison abound: Does Harling’s Steel Magnolias, for example, play to southern stereotypes, or make a sincere attempt to respond to one person’s story?

Selections from Chopin’s two collections will be discussed in light of The Awakening, her novel with which I think most participants will already be familiar. Like the Grandissimes’s literal expedition, Joseph Frowenfield’s expedition into Creole culture, or Honore’s expedition into his beliefs and previous assumptions, Chopin’s female characters are also involved in journeys of exploration. Many of her women characters are steeped in high Creole culture but lack any real power or voice; others are living in the Sabine on the frontier, and some are slaves or servants. In most cases, these characters are circumscribed by metaphors of enclosure. Borders, walls, fences, property lines, and even homes in Chopin’s stories frequently serve to remind us of the limits imposed on one’s ability to explore other possible modes of living and thinking.

Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men (1946)

From Chopin we will move forward to Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, whose principle characters embark upon expeditions of a very different sort. Published in the waning years of the Southern Renaissance, All the King’s Men approaches the topic of expeditions from the direction of politics, power, and institutional corruption. It is also, however, a narrative that concerns existential confusion, the clash of modern methods and rural folkways, the relationship of memory to history, and role that narrative itself plays in representing the past. Willie Stark’s journey to power will provide us with an avenue to discuss the state’s politics and the ways they have been represented. Watching the film adaptation will supplement this aspect of the novel. Understanding the narrator himself, however, is crucial to understanding Stark’s tragedy. Jack Burden’s philosophical ambivalence throughout much of the novel, which oscillates from an escapist idealism to a pessimistic determinism, is ultimately reconciled by Warren’s interpretation of a pragmatic approach to life that was pioneered by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and further developed by his colleague, William James. Warren’s dramatization of these attitudes will encourage us to work together to develop classroom activities that help students understand some of the timeless and fundamental outlooks concerning human experience.

Discussing Jack Burden’s struggle to understand himself and his place in the world by writing about Cass Mastern and Willie Stark will also be useful to participants. Burden must narrate his experience to understand it, a valuable lesson for students in itself. For Burden the world at first “was simply an accumulation of items, odds and ends of things like the broken and misused and dust-shrouded things gathered in a garret. Or it was a flux of things before his eyes (or behind his eyes) and one thing had nothing to do, in the end, with anything else.” After the deaths of Adam Stanton and Willie Stark, however, he learns a lesson: “that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web.” Before, Burden had been unable “to gather the pieces of the puzzle up and put them together to see the pattern.” By the novel’s conclusion, however, he understands that “reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, present, and future events.” In another revealing passage, he thinks: “I had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together. Therefore I lacked some essential confidence in the world and in myself.” Burden, like many modern protagonists, is at first unable to see the hidden connectedness among the “pieces of the puzzle.” He wants a simple ideology, an “explanation.” Yet as Stark tells him, “there ain’t any explanations. Not of anything. All you can do is point at the nature of things. If you are smart enough to see ’em.” Thus recognizing this “spider web,” or as Willie Stark puts it, being “smart enough to see ’em,” or failing to do so, is Jack’s problem, and all our burden. In my estimation, devising teaching plans that encourage young students to be “smart enough to see” the ways people are interconnected should be one of the highest priorities of any cultural enrichment program.

Ernest Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), A Gathering of Old Men (1983), or A Lesson Before Dying (1993), determined by teacher questionnaire

The final major selection would come from the work of Ernest Gaines. His writing also portrays figures who are deeply involved in journeys or expeditions of one kind or another. The interior journeys taken by his characters are often underscored by literal journeys, such as in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman or A Gathering of Old Men. The figure in The Autobiography undertakes the most explicit and panoramic expedition as she as a child negotiates her way North after the Emancipation Proclamation through Reconstruction, the segregated South, and the Civil Rights movement. If chosen by participants, her fictional journey would help us re-connect with the origins of narrative and representation that have inspired much of Louisiana’s belletristic heritage. Dr. Susan Roach has agreed to present the narratives of Sarah Albritton in On My Way (an appropriate title for an Institute on expeditions in Louisiana literature) during this week of study. The speaker will also introduce Louisiana Voices and other online lesson plans, which I think participants will find very useful teaching tools.

If selected, A Gathering of Old Men will generate interesting discussions due to its rich use of humor and modernist technique of employing multiple points of view. Literally, the “old men” only travel in the bed of a truck, through a field, across a cemetery, and to a neighbor’s house, but each citizen is on an expedition into the past, one of reclamation and forgiveness. Other works treat final journeys, final lessons, as in the case of A Lesson Before Dying. Each novel has been adapted to film, and we will watch at least one of them after discussing the text that interests them the most. All potential selections, however, represent ways that writings associated with Louisiana continue to have a special interest in explorations and expeditions. By emphasizing Cable, Chopin, Warren, and Gaines as major figures during the Institute, teachers who participate in the seminar should be able to incorporate one or more of the writers they find most interesting into their lessons.

Frank de Caro, Louisiana Sojourns: Travelers’ Tales and Literary Journeys (1998)

Initially, the Institute’s plan was to compile an extensive reading packet of shorter selections to supplement and add context to the major examples. De Caro’s Louisiana Sojourns, however, will nicely serve this purpose, providing additional continuity to the Institute. As we cover one major text each week, brief daily readings from de Caro’s collection of narratives will give participants additional discussion topics. It will still be necessary for me to hand out some selections or a much smaller reading packet, which I will also make available online, but using a recent edition of narratives organized around the subject of travels and journeys is, I believe, the most sensible way to support a Institute on expeditions in Louisiana Literature. For example, during the week we study Cable, section headings in Louisiana Sojourns such as “American Nile: The River” and “A Splendid Bedlam of a City: New Orleans” will complement the The Grandissimes. When we get to Gaines, “Telling the Story of Our Lives: The African American Presence” and “The World of the Spirits” will enrich our discussions. The book is available in paper from Louisiana State University Press.

As an assistant professor in the English Department at Louisiana Tech and someone who has also taught for several years at Louisiana State University and Alcorn State in Lorman, Mississippi, I have experience teaching in a range of academic environments and working with teachers and students in North Louisiana, South Louisiana, and the Mississippi Delta. My area of study is American literature, especially fiction of the American South. I have published work on writers associated with Louisiana such as Walker Percy, Robert Penn Warren, John Kennedy Toole and others. During the fall of 2001 and spring of 2002, I served as the program scholar for two LEH Library Programs: “Literary Lagniappe”" and “Encounter in Louisiana.” I also teach an undergraduate course on southern American literature, and during the spring of 2002 I led a graduate seminar specifically on the fiction of Louisiana. Combined, these activities have helped me further examine and contextualize the relationship of Louisiana literary studies within the Southern and larger American narrative traditions, giving me hope that participants will leave the Institute with new ideas and approaches for their students as well as suggest perspectives and directions new to me.

To conclude, the principle tool for reaching these objectives will be through discussions of traditional narrative forms. Travel and exploration records, journals, short fiction, folktales, and the novel will provide the seminar with content-intensive study in Louisiana’s literature and culture. Non-textual narrative forms, however, will supplement daily literary analysis and historical survey. Narratives presented in mediums such as the fine arts, music, film, documentary, folklore, architecture, and popular iconography also tell stories, stories that can be read and discussed as texts that speak to us through different channels but nevertheless have voice, character, setting, plot, and motivation. I will work with teachers to develop lessons that help students do their own fieldwork to write some of those stories. The seminar’s fundamental rationale, then, will be to collaborate in ways that result in practical lesson plans and classroom activities that challenge students to understand some of the relationships of previous Louisiana narratives to their current experiences, encouraging them to extend this unique cultural and narrative heritage in directions we cannot possibly anticipate.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following texts are selections of scholarly monographs, bibliographies, and historical overviews of writers, periods, movements and issues relating to Louisiana, the South, travel writing and exploration narratives. A more extensive bibliography will be given to participants during the seminar.

Andrew Lytle. Southerners and Europeans: Essays in a Time of Disorder.

Ayers, Edward L., and Bradley C. Mittendorf, eds. The Oxford Book of the American South: Testimony, Memory, and Fiction.

Bain, Flora, and Rubin. Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary.

Bain, Robert, and Joseph Flora, eds. Fifty Southern Writers after 1900.

Bennett. Comic Visions, Female Voices: Contemporary Women Novelists and Southern Humor.

Blassingame. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies.

Blumberg, Rhoda, ed. Jefferson, Napoleon, and the Louisiana Purchase.

Bradbury, John M. Renaissance in the South: A Critical History of the Literature, 1920-1960.

Bradley. Interim Appointment: W. C. C. Claiborne Letter Book, 1804-1805.

Brantley, Will. Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir.

Brown, Alan. Literary Levees of New Orleans.

Brown, Dorothy H., and Barbara C. Ewell, eds. Louisiana Women Writers: New Essays and a Comprehensive Bibliography.

Bryan, Violet Harrington. The Myth of New Orleans in Literature: Dialogues of Race and Gender.

Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South.

Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, eds. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

Cobb. James L. The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity.

Cowan, Louise. The Fugitive Group: A Literary History.

Cutrer, Thomas W. Parnassus on the Mississippi: The Southern Review and the Baton Rouge Literary Community, 1935-1942.

Davenport, F. Garvin. The Myth of Southern History: Historical Consciousness in Twentieth Century Southern Literature.

Davis, Edward Adams. Louisiana: A Narrative History.

De Caro, Frank, and Rosan Augusta Jordan, eds. Louisiana Sojourns : Travelers' Tales and Literary Journeys.

Disheroon-Green, Suzanne, and Lisa Abney. Songs of the New South: Writing Contemporary Louisiana.

Dobie. Something in Common: Contemporary Louisiana Stories.

Elfenbein, Anna Shannon. Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin.

Forkner, Ben, and Patrick Samway, S.J., eds. A Modern Southern Reader.

Forkner, Ben, and Patrick Samway, S.J., eds. A New Reader of the Old South.

Franklin. Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North.

Gayarre, Charles E, et al. History of Louisiana.

Gohdes. Hunting in the Old South: Original Narratives of the Hunters.

Gray, Richard. The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South.

Gray, Richard. Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region.

Harrison, Elizabeth Jane. The Female Pastoral: Women Writers Re-Visioning the American South.

Hobson, Fred. Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain.

Hobson, Fred. The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World.

Hobson. But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative.

Hoffman, Frederick J. The Art of Southern Fiction.

Holman, C. Hugh. The Roots of Southern Writing.

Holman. The Immoderate Past: The Southern Writer and History.

Honnighausen, Lothar, and Valerie Gennaro Lerda. Rewriting the South.

Hudson, Arthur Palmer. Humor of the Old Deep South.

Humphries, Jefferson, and John Lowe, eds. The Future of Southern Letters.

Inge, Tonette Bond, ed. Southern Women Writers: A New Generation.

Jay B. Hubbell. The South in American Literature,1607-1900.

Jefferson, Thomas. Account of Louisiana.

Kennedy. Literary New Orleans in the Modern World.

Kennedy. Literary New Orleans: Essays and Meditations.

King, Richard. A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955.

Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860.

Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor As Experience and History in American Life and Letters.

Kreyling, Michael. Figures of the Hero in Southern Narrative.

Ladd, Barbara. Nationalism and the Color Line in George Washington Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner.

Lawson, Lewis. Another Generation: Southern Fiction Since World War II.

Louis D. Rubin Jr., et al., eds. The History of Southern Literature.

Lytle. Southerners and Europeans: Essays in a Time of Disorder.

MacKethan, Lucinda H. The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature.

MacKethan. Daughters of Time: Creating Woman's Voice in the Southern Story.

Magee, Rosemary M., ed. Friendship and Sympathy: Communities of Southern Women Writers.

Manning, Carol S., ed. The Female Tradition in Southern Literature.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America.

Megraw, Richard. Confronting Modernity: Art and Society in Louisiana.

Mixon, Wayne. Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865-1913.

Morris and Reinhardt. Southern Writers and Their Worlds.

Moses, Montrose J. The Literature of the South.

Moss. Domestic Novelists in the Old South: Defenders of Southern Culture.

Parrill, William. The Long Haul: Conversations with Southern Writers.

Payne, Ladell. Black Novelists and the Southern Literary Tradition.

Perry, J. Bill, ed. Home Ground: Southern Autobiography.

Post. Cajun Sketches: From the Prairies of Southwest Louisiana.

Pratt, William, ed. The Fugitive Poets: Modern Southern Poetry in Perspective.

Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman, ed. Women Writers of the Contemporary South.

Reisman, Rosemary, and Christopher Canfield, eds. Contemporary Southern Women Fiction Writers.

Romine. Narrative Forms of Southern Community.

Rubin, Louis D. The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South.

Rubin. William Elliott Shoots a Bear: Essays on the Southern Literary Imagination.

Rudnicki. Percyscapes: The Fugue State in Twentieth-Century Southern Fiction.

Simpson, Lewis P. The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature.

Simpson. The Fable of the Southern Writer.

Spivey, Ted. R. Revival: Southern Writers in the Modern City.

Stephens, Robert O. The Family Saga in the South: Generations and Destinies.

Sternberg, ed. Along the River Road: Past and Present on Louisiana’s Historic Byway.

Sullivan, Walter. Death by Melancholy: Essays on Modern Southern Fiction.

Tate: Linda. A Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the Contemporary South.

Taylor. Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin.

Weaver, Richard M. The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought.

Whitt, Jan. Allegory and the Modern Southern Novel.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Burden of Southern History.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South.

LINKS

These sites are among the many dedicated to the Louisiana Purchase, American literature, and Louisiana writers and culture. Some of the sites contain activities and research projects for teachers and students, which we will evaluate and consider in relation to our discussions. These links are preliminary; many will be added or deleted from the final reference list we use in June.

LOUISIANA PURCHASE LOUISIANA HISTORY & CULTURE TRAVEL NARRATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE LEWIS & CLARK ZEBULON PIKE PIERRE LE MOYNE, SIEUR D’IBERVILLE JEAN-BAPTISTE, SIEUR DE BIENVILLE WILLIAM C. C. CLAIBORNE CABEZA DE VACA HERNANDO DE SOTO GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE KATE CHOPIN ROBERT PENN WARREN ERNEST GAINES