C337 (#21877)  The Twentieth Century: Tradition and Change
TR 6:30-9:00
SECOND EIGHT WEEKS COURSE
Satisfies A&H and CS requirements
Professor Herb Marks

This intensive eight-week course will focus on Faulkner’s
masterpiece, Absalom! Absalom! – one of the exemplary works of
twentieth-century fiction, described by Jean-Paul Sartre as “a
veritable revolution in the art of telling a story.”  Its
innovations—shared by some of Faulkner’s earlier work—include
narrative discontinuity, manipulations of time, recastings of myth,
and a form of dialogue that, in the words of another French
critic, “did not so much express thought as reveal the uncertainties
of all forms of human communication.”  Moreover, its complex
reworking of ancient stories and legends makes it an ideal subject
for comparative analysis, so that,  in addition to reading the novel
closely (twice), along with its sources, we shall be looking at how
it relates to other classics of modernist fiction, how it differs
from the traditional nineteenth-century novel, and how it has
affected subsequent writing , in French and German as well as in
English, in part by providing an alternative to the massive legacy
of Proust.

Prerequisite: previous course work in literature at the 200-level or
above, or permission of the instructor.

Note: the subject and approach of this course are both substantially
different from last year’s C337.  Students who took that class may
take this one for Comp Lit credit by enrolling for 3 credits of C495.