BASC70084 - Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Alice Walker's Color Purple

Course Description

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner affirmed a belief that man will not only endure, he will prevail. In Walker’s The Color Purple, Celie’s last – and, amazingly, rapturous – letter / chapter opens “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God.”  Exploring the comic-awful-wrenching saga of Faulkner’s Bundren family’s resolve to bury their mother, and the astounding arc Walker creates from violative terror to crackling redemption, we’ll wrestle with complexities of death and grotesquerie, grievous pain and gasping laughter, the webs of love, race, fealty, possibility, healing, defeat, and triumph. The prose of each is utterly revelatory and constituting. (8 weeks)