The computer scientist Charles Hannon has done amazing work in visualizing various aspects of literature: part of what we call the “digital humanities.” Here is a blog post that argues that Faulkner’s “network” in the novel was influenced by the expanse of “rural electification” in the mid-1930s in the rural South. And here’s the diagram, which we’ll look at today:
…bet you never thought you’d see that title, I bet. Florencia sent me a link to this bit from SNL, which is especially relevant in light of the section of the novel we read for yesterday, in which blackness seems to infect Christmas’s feet and grow, zombie-like, upwards.
Here the story is the same, if the mood is comic rather than tragic. If nothing else, the skit pulls back the veil that might make us thing that the citizens of Jefferson express ideas about race that are utterly foreign to 2020…
You have your second entry in our encyclopedic guide to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha Co. next week. Note: since a lot of medium-length entries already exist for TSAF and AILD, you are free to substitute either three short entries or one normal blog post (on any topic you like). Here are some useful materials and guidelines:
He looks like right after the maul hits the steer and it is no longer alive and dont yet know that it is dead.
As I Lay Dying, p. 173
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:
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:
A central feature of this course will be the writing we do on this site. In what follows, I will outline three things:
First things first: why blog?
1. Blogging is sharable: rather than have a private circuit between you and me, we have a much more dynamic conversation across the entire class.
2. Blogging is public, sort of: I like the idea that we are responsible for our ideas in front of broader audiences. In practical terms, I doubt anyone is listening in most of the time, but I think it’s important that we roll up our sleeves and defend our arguments in an open and public forum as often as possible. And of course, you can show your family/friends/pets what we’ve been up to in class. For those who have reservations about privacy, note that a) you can only be identified via firstname+last initial, so you have relative privacy beyond our class; and b) you are free to delete your posts at the end of class. If anyone has serious reservations despite all this, feel free to contact me. A fuller accounting of rights/responsibilities is here.
3. Blogging is sturdy: rather than forget the piece of paper once it’s been handed back, we can link back to prior statements or observations, or to each others’. If you like, you can leave your posts up for future students to see.
4. Blogging is responsive: rather than only getting comments from me, you’ll comment on and get comments on each other’s work.
So how do you post? Here’s a quick guide to posting on WordPress for newbies. It’s super easy once you figure it out the first time. So here goes:
1. LOG ON: anyone can see the blog site, but only those logged on as “authors” can post. If you simply click on the link you received when I invited you, you can follow the prompts to log in. Two helpful hints:
a) you can always tell when you’re logged in, since there’s a slim black bar across the top that looks like this:
and b), if you ever want to go straight to the “back end” of the site (called the “dashboard” in WP parlance), throw “admin” on the end of the URL. So, jallred.net/wordpress/faulkner takes you to the site, whereas jallred.net/wordpress/faulkner/admin takes you to the login dialogue and then to the “dashboard.” Try it.
2. START A POST: there are several ways to post. Here’s the easiest: click the <+ NEW> icon in the top middle of the screen and select “post.” It looks like this:
3. WRITE SOMETHING: “New Post” will take you to a basic text editor. So write something. If you want to get fancy, you can add italics, bold, indentation, insert images or other media, and whatnot. But most of the time you’ll just try to write some reasonable sentences. When you’re done, click PUBLISH on the right (see image below). Or, if you’re not quite ready, you can save it as a draft and reopen it later, via the “POSTS” section of the dashboard. Helpful hint: WordPress autosaves your work every few seconds, so it’s very, very rare to lose stuff. Nonetheless it’s not a bad idea to compose posts on a word processor and then paste them into WP just in case. I personally live dangerously most of the time and have never lost anything, but your call.
We’re good, right? Happy blogging.
What makes for an excellent post? For this class, posts should:
Here’s a simple rubric, adapted from Mark Sample, that I will use to evaluate your work (see how the academic blogosphere encourages sharing and exchange? I told you so!):
| Rating | Characteristics |
| 4 | Exceptional. The post is focused and coherently integrates examples with explanations or analysis. It moves beyond summary to engage the text critically, giving a sharp, original close reading. It makes useful connections to other texts and raises novel questions. It points out aspects of the text that will surprise and stimulate the casual reader: “why didn’t I think of that?!” |
| 3 | Satisfactory. The post is reasonably focused, and explanations or analysis are mostly based on examples or other evidence. It provides a dutiful reading of primary text but fails to engage the text more than glancingly. The entry reflects moderate engagement with the topic and/or rehashes what was said in class. |
| 2 | Underdeveloped. The post is restricted to summary, without consideration of alternative perspectives, and may contain misreadings of the text at one or more points. The entry reflects passing engagement with the topic. |
| 1 | Limited. The journal entry is unfocused, or simply rehashes others’ comments; it fails to grasp fundamental aspects of the argument. |
| 0 | No Credit. The journal entry is missing or consists of one or two disconnected sentences. |
Last but not least, here’s an example of a good-looking post. We won’t read The Unvanquished this time, so the particulars won’t be familiar. But note how the author:
Your results may vary, and that’s fine. I just wanted you to see what I consider strong work before you launch into it yourselves.
Check out this playful yet profound portal into reading Faulkner’s work. We’ll be talking a lot out the subjective experience of reading Faulkner’s work for the first time: what kind of reader he anticipates, how he inducts readers into what Philip Weinstein calls the practice of “unknowing,” how we readers compete, as it were, with narrators and characters for knowledge of past events. And to be clear, the linked material is just an interesting suggestion by one person for how to start reading Faulkner; it is not any part of a syllabus for our class!
I wanted to share with you some of my favorite entries you produced for the Yoknapedia this term. Though it’s a long list, it’s by no means comprehensive, so don’t feel bad if your entry is not present!
My general impression is that, with this second iteration of the encyclopedia, you students had to dig a bit deeper and focus on more marginal texts (we didn’t read The Unvanquished last time, so it was “new” for the Yoknapedia) and figures/concepts. I also note that very many of you focused on women this time around, especially women who are marginal to the texts in question but, upon closer examination, often resonate deeply with themes in Faulkner’s work and in modernist literature more broadly.
Examples of this latter tendency include Molly’s piece on Mrs. McEachern, tying her to the broader landscape of Faulkner’s depiction of women subtly resisting patriarchy. And Lynn’s well-researched piece on Caroline Bascomb, which explores the contradictory aspect of Caroline (and by extension the matriarchs of the plantocracy) as “both prisoner and jailer” of the social dominant. Along similar lines, Meghan’s medium entry on Hightower’s unnamed wife examines the way her “wildness” goes viral in the novel, infecting Hightower, so to speak, and pointing to a broader range of “wild” expressions of sexuality by women like Burden and non-conforming figures like Hightower himself. And Karen’s entry on Bobbie Allen is exemplary for its deep dive into a seemingly bit player, revealing her roots (via her name) in popular culture and sensitively analyzing her delicate balance of vulnerability and power as a white woman (if not “lady”). Finally, Carla’s gloss on Drusilla Hawk explores Drusilla’s “unsexing” of herself during the turmoil of the War and her recapture, as it were, after the War’s end. I’ll also wedge in a “medium” entry on a marginal man: Kate explores Maury Bascomb from TSAF, arguing that the text subtly links him to African Americans via a common denigration and marginalization.
There were many helpful “short” entries; here are some of the best:
Katie’s Riposte in Tertio provides a nice illustration of the maneuver and a lucid explanation of what the fencing term might mean as the title of one of the stories in The Unvanquished.
Sal unpacks Pantaloon, explaining the relevance of Early Modern “commedia dell’arte” to Faulkner’s text but noting the limits of the comparison of Rider to the “Pantaloon” type in that cultural form.
Cara’s take on horses explores the relationship between the equine ilk and mobility, a connection that can be read widely across Faulkner’s work.
Melissa glosses Gaius Petronius Arbiter, a writer from the first Neronian era in Rome (we are currently experiencing the second Neronian era IMO). LIA imagines Joanna’s decadent sexual body in terms of Petronius’s famous satire Satyricon, and Melissa’s lushly illustrated entry helps us to grasp the implications of the reference.
And because we all love lists, here’s a Top Five that come in for special commendation:
Lynn’s Shegog gives a breathtakingly comprehensive review of the literature on Shegog’s sermon in a compact space, a review that helps us understand how questions of race have thundered into Faulkner studies since the 1980s and transformed the field.
Kate’s long entry on cloisters ruminates on Faulkner’s penchant for the word “cloister” and the concept of seclusion. It’s a fascinating itinerary through a range of figures and works that make us think about the contradictory aspects of the cloister: as solitude and imprisonment, as privilege and prison, as intimacy and expulsion.
Katie’s medium entry on Cassandra helpful unpacks the name that Jason III believes Sutpen intended for Clytemnestra: it’s a really full gloss on the many implications of the name with helpful reference to secondary literature.
Rene’s theoretically sophisticated take on “parchment” as a descriptor for Christmas’s skin/flesh reads the figure through the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, arguing that Christmas’s blankness does not so much point to ideology’s inscription of subjects as Christmas’s status as what Agamben calls “bare life,” a zero degree of biological existence that the State can sacrifice at will to shore up its own sovereignty.
Karen’s long entry on dress is a virtuosic long riff on the many valences of clothing in the County. It wears its theory lightly, pointing out the way clothes dialectically combine individual choice and sensibility with deeply inscribed ideological norms. The essay then proceeds to lay out ways in which clothing manifests in the County in ways that illuminate Faulkner’s portrayal of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
I hope you enjoy reading each other’s work as much as I have enjoyed reading yours. Thanks for your hard work and creativity this term.
I didn’t make nearly enough of the stirring story of toppling monuments to the Confederacy in New Orleans this month. After reading GDM and AA in particular, we should have a keen sense of the depth of historical resonance as Mayor Landrieu has overseen the removal of monuments to Confederate leaders such as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. The removals have been accompanied by protests and counter-protests, often with valences of fascism (e.g., burning torches and heavy arms) as well as more reasoned reactions by writers from right to left meditating on what it means to remember and/or memorialize the past.
For us, we should think of certain aspects of Faulkner’s legacy. For example, we might remember how large the War looms in the imagination of Quentin Compson, so much so that he feels emptied out in the present, “his very body an … empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names.” We might also reflect on two contrary vectors in Faulkner’s work that are highly relevant. On the one hand, we have Faulkner’s strenuous effort, amid the resurgence of nativism and white supremacy, to reveal the absurdity of racial ideologies (especially in LIA and AA via Christmas and Bon), and to attempt, however awkwardly at times, to inhabit black subjectivities and imagine black desires (especially via Lucas and Molly in GDM).
In similar fashion, Landrieu and other white elites, who very much still dominate the city and state governments and control a vast share of capital and influence, nonetheless have made a courageous effort to chip away at the toxic legacy of white supremacy with this act. On the other hand, we should remember that Faulkner shares with his liberal Southern counterparts an antipathy to some aspect of antiracist progressivism of his era and a strong preference for the kind of “going slow” on racial issues that King later mocked as meaning “never.” The very existence of these monuments in 2017 speaks to the equivalence of “later” and “never” in many minds up to this point, and the push to remove them now represents, one hopes, a growing will on the part of a substantial majority of the nation to reckon with this painful past. We need to replace what Landrieu calls “a fictional, sanitized Confederacy” in our official modes of memory with a more complex narrative in which white supremacy and the violent subjugation of indigenous peoples and members of minority groups is central to the formation and maintenance of “The South.” Here’s Landrieu’s speech, which is well worth a read: http://bit.ly/2qSAv6Q .
