Monthly Archives: September 2020

Claudia Rankine, “The Sound and the Fury” poem

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It’s not about Faulkner, per se, but a student in another course sent me this poem from the contemporary African American poet Claudia Rankine. If Jason is a Trumpist before such a thing existed, I think we can see echoes of themes in Faulkner’s novel at work in Rankine’s moving meditation on the barriers to self-reflection that seem to be built into whiteness in the US:

"Sound & Fury"

Poetry: "This is what it means to wear a color and believe / the embrace of its touch."

Faulkner and the Jim Crow South

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Thought you might appreciate a post on the New York Review of Books site on Faulkner. Michael Gorra observes that Faulkner was steeped in the culture and politics of the “Jim Crow” era of radical segregation that dominated the U.S. South between 1875 and the late 1960s (and beyond). There are references to several of the novels we will read, including TSAF, LIA, and AA:

The Jim Crow South in Faulkner"s Fiction | Michael Gorra

There is a deep congruity between the movements of Faulkner"s mind, with its sense of an inescapable family trauma, and the history and culture of his region, so deep that it hardly seems possible to distinguish between them. So many of the ills he describes are with us still.