ENG 427SEM

The content of this course is variable. Concentrated and detailed study of the works, biography, and milieu of William Faulkner. For example: Prof. N. Schmitz William Faulkner is the William Shakespeare of our national literature. He writes tragedies, comedies, tragicomedies, short fiction that might be said to be the equivalent of Shakespeares sonnets, and he is as profound and ironic as the first great Will. Oxford, Mississippi is a shrine not unlike Stratford, England. France gives Faulkner his gloire. Japan venerates Faulkner. Shouldn't you have some knowledge what this is all about? Shouldn't you have bright things t say about The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying? Yoknapatawpha County is Faulkner's personal post-Confederate South. You will learn its geography, its social history, its family histories. Shakespeare writes in and out of an England triumphant, empowered, everywhere boldly questing. Faulkner writes in and out of a defeated occupied post-Civil War American South. Actually the United States is just as triumphant in the middle of the 20th century as England was in the Renaissance, but that is never the story in Faulkner's fiction.

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