In his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner spoke about the writer’s duty and privilege to remind us of “courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice.” From the iconic “A Rose for Emily” to the lesser known “Two Soldiers” to the challenging “The Bear,” we will read a dozen of Faulkner’s stories and discuss how they make these abstractions concrete. Some of the stories may make us laugh, some may make us cry, some may make us uncomfortable with how they capture the racism that was endemic in Faulkner’s South. This class will challenge us to understand Faulkner’s attitudes about race in the context of his fiction that exposes racism and its complicated legacy.
NOTE: Required: “Faulkner: Stories” (Library of America, ed. Theresa M. Towner, 2023). This edition is available only in hardcover. It is also the only one that contains all the pieces we’ll discuss. You can order a copy at Bloomsbury Books or a new or used copy from online sources.