Why read William Faulkner today? This Mississippi author, at his height between 1929 and 1942, contemplated issues through his fiction that are still crucial in our own time. Moreover, he did so with experimental abandon. He scrutinized the afterlife of the plantation and the doomed social invention of racial difference; he queried norms of gender and sexuality and family; he considered non-dominant ways of perceiving the world, including through the minds of neurodivergent characters; and he thought about how the South was being changed by the Machine Age, including its loss of wilderness spaces. For Faulkner (and many other Modernists), to investigate the origins and effects of these social processes entailed dismantling a traditional narrative edifice, often doing away with a third-person omniscient narrator, a single point of view, linear time, or typical punctuation.

In this discussion-based mini-course, we will read two of the novels from his major phase, The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930). I will also intersperse shorter works by Black artists (musicians, fiction writers) to offer a variant telling of the Jim Crow South, and to understand how Faulkner was in dialogue with Black sonic and narrative forms. You will write two short papers that you’ll be able to workshop in class.

This course does not fulfill any English major/minor requirements. This course is an elective for English majors and minors.