English 190

Research Seminar: The Temporality of Faulkner's Novels

Book List

Faulkner, W.: Absalom, Absalom!; Faulkner, W.: As I Lay Dying; Faulkner, W.: Light in August; Faulkner, W.: The Sound and the Fury; Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby; Toomer, Jean: Cane; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway

Other Readings and Media

Course Reader available from Odin Readers.

Description

Jean-Paul Sartre has famously compared Faulkner’s sense of time to “a man sitting in a convertible and looking back.”  From this perspective, Sartre contends, the only view is that of the past, made “hard, clear and immutable” in its isolation.  Yet if Faulkner writes with a gaze fixed on the Southern past, his historical consciousness has been shaped by the experience of time in the modern moment—an idea Sartre nicely conveys through the figure of the convertible ride.

This seminar explores the complex registers of time in Faulkner’s major novels.  Special attention is given to the relationship between the social experience of time represented in Faulkner’s story worlds and the readerly experience of narrative time created through Faulkner’s innovative handling of narrative.  To gain a better sense of the literary models that influenced Faulkner, we will also read a few key works by other modernist writers. 

A course reader will include essays by thinkers who helped to shape the modern understanding of time.  Students will be guided through the planning and execution of a fifteen-page paper, due at the end of the term.

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