Elmira College is pleased to announce that Dr. Mary Ann Wilson will
teach a three-week graduate course entitled Mark Twain's Legacies - Jean
Stafford, Kaye Gibbons, Ernest Gaines, July 19 - August 7, 1999.  The
class will meet at Quarry Farm Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 12
p.m.

This course will treat three quite different writers who show the
far-reaching and continuing influence of Mark Twain: Jean Stafford, a
Westerner transplanted to the East; Kaye Gibbons, a contemporary white
Southerner from North Carolina; and Ernest Gaines, an African American
Southerner who grew up in a small Cajun-Creole community between
Lafayette and Baton Rouge.  Despite their seemingly disparate
backgrounds, all three twentieth-century American writers show the
influence of and have acknowledged their identity, their fidelity to
American folkways and vernacular speech, and in the case of Gibbons and
Gaines, the honest and unsentimental treatment of Southern race
relations.  All three, like Mark Twain, attempt to transform an
essentially oral tradition into a literary one, whether in the Western
slang of Jean Stafford's novel, _The Mountain Lion_ (1947) or her group
of stories set in the West; the innocent but wise voice of Kaye Gibbon's
Huck Finn-like Ellen Foster; or the illiterate diary entries of Ernest
Gaines' hero, Jefferson, as he awaits his execution on death row in the
racist South of the 1940's.  Ernest Gaines, author of _A Lesson Before
Dying_ will conduct a class during the course as a special guest.

Dr. Mary Ann Wilson is a visiting professor from the University of
Southwestern Louisiana where she is Associate Professor of English.  Dr.
Wilson has published widely in twentieth-century American Literature and
Women's Studies.  She also authored several entries in the _Mark Twain
Encyclopedia_ edited by J.R. LeMaster and James D. Wilson (Garland
Publishing, Inc., 1993).

For more information about registration and housing please contact the
Elmira College Office of Continuing Education:
Telephone: (607) 735-1825
Fax: (607) 735-1758
E-mail: [log in to unmask]