I am Dr. Julie L. Lester, and I am an assistant professor of English at Southwest Tennessee Community College. I earned my Ph.D. and Masters in African American Literature at the University of Memphis, and I have been here at SWTCC since I graduated in 2011. I am looking forward to this semester, and to exploring southern culture, as well as helping you to develop and hone your writing skills. As this is a writing class, we will be doubling our focus on southern popular culture with lessons on writing and composition, research, mechanics, grammar, as well as perfecting our facility with different rhetorical methods: narration, cause and effect analysis, comparison and contrast, and an analysis of literature, which is designed to culminate the semester by combining all the skills learned in previous assignments.
For the first two weeks of our time together, we'll be looking at the Southern Character and the Southern Storytelling Impulse. Whether you are a native-born southerner, or a transplant from the North, East, or West, you are well-acquainted with the southern impulse to talk. Sharing stories, building on a long- and well-honored vernacular tradition, and indulging in the occasional tall tale are quintessential southern qualities. Perhaps there is a member of your family, a close friend, or a figure from your childhood who was a consummate storyteller? Our first text we will be looking at is by a favorite author of mine--and a true blue southerner, Zora Neale Hurston.
Hurston rose to fame as a short story writer, ethnographer, and folklorist from Eatonville, Florida--the first incorporated all African American town in the U.S. So enamored of her hometown was Zora that she chronicled the lives of the folk she grew up with in compilations of short narratives, such as Mules and Men, and in her fiction, as in the 1938 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. She has become, since Alice Walker rediscovered her in 1970, an American treasure, and her reputation for her storytelling endeared her to her friends and fans alike.
As you read Hurston's text, think about the ways the author creates herself as a character in her own story. Even though Dust Tracks was published as her autobiography, Hurston, who was infamous for her tendency to embellish, always kept the 'whole truth' to herself. Her actual birthdate is still unknown, as are the details of her life. The only record we truly have, is what Hurston chose to disclose--and those details create a persona we come to know as Hurston. In what ways do southern storytellers create themselves as fictional entities?
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