S1120 Wiiliam Faulkner and the American South

A great writer,\" asserts Gilles Deleuze, \"is... a foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own language, he carves out a nonpreexistent foreign language within his own language. He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur.\" Deleuze\'s words capture, with startling economy, the exhilarating experience of reading William Faulkner. Few writers can be said to have put so recognizable a stamp on the English language: from the twists of his syntax to the idiosyncrasies of his usage to the instantly recognizable cadences of a prosodic rhythm like no other, his is as a foreign language in the American tradition, and the novel, in his hands, becomes something unprecedented and strange. Striving to attend to the many pleasures of Faulkner\'s language, we will also attempt to come to grips with Faulkner\'s America. For few writers, too, have been as perceptive about the categories of American personhood -- \"race,\" class, gender, and regional identity in particular -- and about the different ways such categories have inscribed themselves, often with not inconsiderable violence, on the bodies of human subjects.
To examine these questions, the course will focus on detailed readings of Faulkner\'s ravishing and fascinating texts, which we will read slowly enough for students to have time to attend to their strangeness and difficulty. We will begin with other literary imaginings of the American South—W.J. Cash\'s The Mind of the South and an essay by Henry James about the South from The American Scene. We will then turn to the question of slavery, which we will examine by way of Hortense Spillers\' great essay \"Mama\'s Baby, Papa\'s Maybe.\" The bulk of the course will be spent on three of Faulkner\'s masterpieces: As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! Reading these texts roughly in order of their increasing complexity, we will attempt to develop a vocabulary for discussing Faulkner\'s innovations in novelistic language and form. While we will not have time to discuss them in the class, students who find themselves fascinated by Faulkner might, in their final projects, examine other, by no means minor, texts, some of which are perhaps deceptively simple in their formal aspirations but which present not only astonishingly prescient analyses of race and class in American life and not only unmatched chronicles of Southern culture in the post-Civil War period but also quietly innovative formal experiments of their own: Go Down, Moses; The Hamlet; and The Unvanquished.\r\n

Learning Outcomes:
I hope that students will come to a greater understanding and appreciation of the writing of William Faulkner and that they will, in doing so, become more sophisticated and thoughtful readers of literary texts. I also hope that they will begin to have a sense of questions they might ask about the history and culture of the American South, and about how Faulkner\'s writing might be seen in that context.

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Teaching and Evaluation Methods:
While, when it seems necessary, I will provide students with background information, the course will be based on discussion. Depending on the make-up of the class, I might ask students to give very short presentations introducing the material on particular days, possibly including some background information on American (particularly, Southern) history; otherwise, evaluation will be based on writing: a short paper at mid-term and a longer final paper at the end of the course.

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Required Preliminary Knowledge:
None