Faulkner and the Southern Gothic

ENGLISH 90FG Subject & Catalog Number

Description

William Faulkner’s South is a haunted place. In Yoknapatawpha – Faulkner’s imaginary county –we find confederate uniforms rotting inside wardrobes, ruined and faded plantation mansions, dusty ledger books, rotting corpses, unmarked graves and locked rooms. At the same time, Faulkner’s books reverberate with the extensive effects of modernity: the expansion of new technologies into a rural, agrarian landscape; the ecological devastations of modern industry; the impact of the camera, the typewriter, and the phonograph upon literature itself. With his capacious literary production (19 novels and numerous short stories), technical and stylistic innovations, and attention to the racial, social, economic, and gendered dynamics of the Modern South, Faulkner heralded a generation of Southern writers whose work grappled with Faulkner’s controversial legacy. 

In this class, we will read four of Faulkner’s early works – The Sound & the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) – and ask how these texts wrestle with the many afterlives of the Southern plantation. The course will work to introduce students to the Southern Gothic genre by tracing the genre’s tropes in Faulkner’s ghostly and decaying landscapes. In the second half of the semester, we will explore what happens to Southern and American literature after Faulkner. Reading Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, and Jesmyn Ward, we will ask how their novels and short stories reinterpret the Modern South and the Southern Gothic, speaking back to Faulkner’s ghost.