ENGL 339
William Faulkner Fall 2021
Division I
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William Faulkner was an experimental modernist; he was also deeply mired in the whole history of racism in the South and in the U.S. generally. What is the relation of these two facts? What is revealed, and what is hidden, in the brilliant obscurity of his prose? Faulkner seems to have known, consciously or unconsciously, as much as any white person in the twentieth century about race; for that reason, his African American contemporaries and ours have often sought him out in particular for a dialogue on the topic. Thus, we’ll read Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing Unburied, Sing” alongside Faulkner’s five great novels from 1929-1940.