Weird South

<p>How do we read southern literature in a postplantation postregional and posthuman moment? How do we address the urgent contemporary catastrophes of the Anthropocene in these newly leveled landscapes? Put simply how do we parse the levels of human responsibility--both for apocalypse and for deliverance--in contexts where settler-colonial and racial capitalist histories dramatically shape our reality? <p/>Reading modern and contemporary southern literary texts from a variety of perspectives these lectures engage the new materialist object-oriented ontologies that critique and decenter human agency while uncovering the lasting determinative haunting realities of humanity's detention within what Timothy Morton calls the weird web of our entwined social racial economic and natural ecologies. <p/>As a concept in the burgeoning conversation about Anthropocenic disaster and climate emergency the weird is a powerful way to conceptualize not just human hubris but also humility: we are no different from no more powerful than any other living or inanimate objects--neither the organisms that take up residence in our bodies nor the myriad things that we imagine we create fashion patrol and control.</p>