Faulkner

Annotation

OBJECTIVES

This course will study the fiction of one of America’s greatest and most challenging novelists. We will pay attention to the way Faulkner identifies and modifies subject matter and technique over the span of his career, and how the writer’s personal, cultural, and social circumstances condition those choices. Faulkner returned in numerous works to a few central preoccupations, constructing his imaginative domain of Yoknapatawpha County to allow him to develop characters and dramatic situations from multiple standpoints, giving each new work unusual resonance with preceding ones. We’ll explore Faulkner’s sense of developing artistry and knowledge of his world, the inter-relatedness of his fictional works as well as each one’s originality, and his shifting stature as a regional, national, and world novelist. Faulkner described the novelist’s task as depicting “the heart in conflict with itself,” and we’ll want to ask what the grounds of such conflict are in his vision. Faulkner’s art encompasses both the sphere of individual being—heroic ambition, extraordinary exertion, grim endurance, proud failure, hopeless despair, comic resignation—as well as the history of his American South—that region of the nation at once more idealized and demonized than any other in consequence of its complex entanglements with colonialism, the plantation economy, slavery and racism, .

The Collected Stories

Sanctuary

The Sound and the Fury

As I Lay Dying

Light in August

Absalom, Absalom!

The Hamlet

ASSESSMENT

Each student will: 1. present one book review-style report on a major volume of criticism drawn from a list provided (1000 words) 2. submit one exposition and critique of a major periodical essay (1000 words) 3. identify one problem or question in one of the literary texts and sketch how the subject might be explored

(in-class presentation)