Předměty

OBJECTIVES
This course will study the fiction of one of America’s greatest and most challenging novelists. We will pay attention
to the way Faulkner identifies and modifies subject matter and technique over the span of his career, and how the
writer’s personal, cultural, and social circumstances condition those choices. Faulkner returned in numerous works
to a few central preoccupations, constructing his imaginative domain of Yoknapatawpha County to allow him to
develop characters and dramatic situations from multiple standpoints, giving each new work unusual resonance
with preceding ones. We’ll explore Faulkner’s sense of developing artistry and knowledge of his world, the
inter-relatedness of his fictional works as well as each one’s originality, and his shifting stature as a regional,
national, and world novelist. Faulkner described the novelist’s task as depicting “the heart in conflict with itself,” and
we’ll want to ask what the grounds of such conflict are in his vision. Faulkner’s art encompasses both the sphere of
individual being—heroic ambition, extraordinary exertion, grim endurance, proud failure, hopeless despair, comic
resignation—as well as the history of his American South—that region of the nation at once more idealized and
demonized than any other in consequence of its complex entanglements with colonialism, the plantation
economy, slavery and racism, .

The Collected Stories
Sanctuary
The Sound and the Fury
As I Lay Dying
Light in August
Absalom, Absalom!
The Hamlet

ASSESSMENT
Each student will:
1. present one book review-style report on a major volume of criticism drawn from a list provided (1000 words)
2. submit one exposition and critique of a major periodical essay (1000 words)
3. identify one problem or question in one of the literary texts and sketch how the subject might be explored
(in-class presentation)

Poslední úprava: Znojemská Helena, Mgr., Ph.D. (24.01.2011)