TuTh 2:30-3:45pm
HU 111

William Faulkner has given us a vivid and densely textured picture
of the racial tensions that have shaped our personal and political
landscape since the Civil War. In his fiction he focuses on the
inner drama that comes from living in a racially mixed society.  His
is a story found not in history books but in the memories of its
narrators who are forced to confront a past which threatens to
destroy their lives. Rather than a linear narrative told from a
single perspective, Faulkner creates multiple disjunctive stories
obsessively told and retold from different perspectives. His fiction
invites us to reflect on the way the mind remembers and responds to
the past, the relation between storytelling and personal and
collective identity, and the role of  myth and tradition in
(southern) culture.

Our course, however, will have a double focus: on the one hand the
fictional world of America’s greatest twentieth-century novelist, on
the other the real world of southern slavery and its aftermath in
the second half of the nineteenth century. We will thus be bridging
two disciplines, literary criticism and history, and attempting to
see how each illuminates the other. Along with selections from a
celebrated study by Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished
Revolution, we shall draw on a number of first-person slave
narratives and on the newspaper writings of John Mitchell, editor of
the Richmond Planet (late 1890's). We shall also study legal
documents ranging from the early slave laws to the Supreme Court
case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1898) which set the terms of the
subsequent debate on segregation. And to see how the historical
burden that weighed so heavily on Faulkner was treated by an African-
American contemporary, we shall read Zora Neale Thurston’s novel on
the legacy of slavery, Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Throughout we
shall be engaged in intensive study of three of Faulkner’s most
demanding works: The Sound and the Fury,  Absalom, Absalom, and Go
Down Moses.

Provisional readings:
Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury (1929); Absalom, Absalom (1936); Go
Down Moses (1942)
Zora Neale Thurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2002)
Voices from Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives, ed. Norman
Yetman (based on oral histories recorded by the Federal Writers’
Project in the 1930's)
W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folks (1903)
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988)
Richmond Planet, newspaper edited by John Mitchell (1895...)
legal cases (i.e. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896); Loving v. Virginia
(1967)