English 166

Description

"The past is never dead," Faulkner famously said. "It is not even past." In our time of racial turmoil, few High Modernist writers feel more contemporary. Faulkner managed to construct in Yoknapatawpha County a second reality where the country's racial present and past are enacted and re-enacted in painful and often brutal detail. His intricate portrait of a land bound together and ripped apart by the fallen inheritance of race has never seemed more startlingly present. We will explore the major works of this foundational American writer and seek to understand what makes his work so vibrant. And we will trace his influence through a range of storytellers from here and abroad, from Juan Rulfo, Flannery O'Connor and Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Toni Morrison, Alice Munro and Cormac McCarthy.