BASC50095 - “The Saddest Words” Civil War in the Fiction of William Faulkner

Course Description

We take our title from the recently published, critically acclaimed work by Michael Gorra, “a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.” The saddest words are “was” and “again.”
    The focus of the class is Faulkner’s fiction—Absalom, Absalom! (1936), his “most demanding and most majestic novel” (Gorra, SW: 233), and three short stories, “Barn Burning,” “A Rose for Emily,” and “That Evening Sun”—though we read it in light of Gorra’s commentary and analysis, with a view toward coming to terms with the ongoing, conflicted, and problematic legacy of the Civil War.
“The real war lies not only in the physical combat,” Gorra writes, “but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning. Or as the former slave Ringo says in The Unvanquished, during a Reconstruction era quarrel over voting rights, ‘This War aint over. Hit just started good.’” (SW: 24)
    That war is our heritage. It is also our present.
    Of Absalom, Absalom! Gorra writes: “No one can read it quickly or even entirely with pleasure, but anyone who can hear its flowered dissonance will know that such books are why we read.” (SW: 25)

Course Outline

Required Texts:

Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom! The Corrected Text (Vintage) 978-0679732181
Faulkner, William, Collected Stories of William Faulkner (Vintage) 978-0679764038

Recommended [the two chapters to be discussed in class will be posted to Canvas, but we’ll make some reference to other chapters]:
Gorra, Michael, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War (2020)  978-63149-170-2

Suggested:
Aaron, Daniel, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (1973)
Penn Warren, Robert, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (1961)
Wilson, Edmund, Patriotic Gore (1962)

Notes

Online registration deadline: Thursday, March 24, 5 pm CT.