Professor Wai Chee Dimock begins her discussion of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying by orienting the novel to the Great Depression in the South, as focalized through such famous texts as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Once this macro history is established, she reads the narrative techniques of As I Lay Dying through two analytic lenses. First, she draws on Bakhtin’s notion of social dialects to underscore the language that indexes poor whites as a Southern type. Second, she marshals Frank Kermode’s idea of narrative secrecy to show how two secrets in As I Lay Dying--Dewey Dell’s illegitimate pregnancy and Jewel’s illegitimate birth--are gradually revealed to the reader through Faulkner’s multiple narrators, each a speaker of a socially codified dialect, and each a practitioner of narrative secrecy in his or her own right.  

1. Introduction
2. Hemingway's In Our Time (Part I)
3. Hemingway's In Our Time (Part II)
4. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Part I)
5. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Part II)
6. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (Part I)
7. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (Part II)
8. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (Part III)
9. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (Part IV)
10. Hemingway's To Have and Have Not (Part I)
11. Hemingway's To Have and Have Not (Part II)
12. Fitzgerald's Short Stories
13. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (Part I)
14. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (Part II)
15. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (Part III)
16. Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (Part I)
17. Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (Part II)
18. Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (Part III)
19. Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (Part IV)
20. Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (Part I)
21. Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (Part II)
22. Faulkner's Light in August (Part I)
23. Faulkner's Light in August (Part II)
24. Faulkner's Light in August (Part III)
25. Faulkner's Light in August (Part IV)

This course examines major works by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, exploring their interconnections on three analytic scales: the macro history of the United States and the world; the formal and stylistic innovations of modernism; and the small details of sensory input and psychic life.

Warning: Some of the lectures in this course contain graphic content and/or adult language that some users may find disturbing.