Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:03 — 46.7MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS

Professor Wai Chee Dimock closes her reading of The Sound and the Fury by reading section four–the section related by an omniscient narrator–through Luster and Dilsey, the two black characters whose personal and racial histories are woven into the history of the Compson family. Luster and Dilsey’s centrality to the final section of the novel, particularly their interactions with the Reverent Shegog on Easter Sunday, transform The Sound and the Fury into a story of redemption; they reconstitute a sense of community whose loss is mourned in Jason’s section. Professor Dimock concludes by reading the final scene of section four–Jason’s taking over of the horse Queenie from Luster’s control–as Jason’s brief and heroic redemption, the only respite that Faulkner grants Jason in the course of the novel.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:49 — 42.0MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS

Professor Wai Chee Dimock discusses Jason’s section of The Sound and the Fury with reference to Raymond Williams’s notion of the “knowable community.” Jasons’s narrative is characterized by the loss of that knowable community, by his pointed rage against his family and servants, as well as his diffuse anger against larger, unknowable entities like the “New York Jews,” Wall Street, Western Union, and the United States government. Professor Dimock reads this anger as a harbinger of the modern condition: a threatening world in which strangers and impersonality reign supreme. In her reading, she shows Faulkner expressing qualified sympathy for Jason, whose loss of a utopian model of community is represented with sadness and pathos in the final sections of the novel.

Warning: This lecture contains graphic content and/or adult language that some users may find disturbing.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:12 — 44.1MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS

Professor Wai Chee Dimock continues her discussion of The Sound and the Fury by juxtaposing Quentin’s stream-of-consciousness to his brother Benjy’s narrative subjectivity. Professor Dimock argues that Faulkner uses stylistic parallels between the two sections to communicate “kinship” and “variation” between the two narrators. In her readings, she focuses on their relationship with the black characters in The Sound and the Fury, as well as their reactions to Caddy’s loss of sexual innocence. She concludes with a discussion of Quentin’s suicide as a reaction to the “second-hand tragedy” of Caddy’s pregnancy.

Warning: This lecture contains graphic content and/or adult language that some users may find disturbing.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:06 — 45.9MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS

Professor Wai Chee Dimock begins her discussion of The Sound and the Fury by presenting Faulkner’s main sources for the novel, including Act V, Scene 5 of Macbeth and theories of mental deficiency elaborated by John Locke and Henry Goddard. Her main focus is on the experimental subjectivity of the novel’s first section which is narrated by Benjy Compson, a mentally retarded 33 year old who is completely innocent of his family’s decline and fall in 1920s Jefferson, Mississippi. Professor Dimock traces Benjy’s preoccupation with his sister Caddy and her sexual innocence through his sense of smell, and the repeated phrase “Caddy smelled like trees.” She concludes by observing that Faulkner protects Benjy from the loss of Caddy by allowing him to move seamlessly between the present and the past, shielding him in his own memories.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:08 — 45.9MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS

Professor Wai Chee Dimock concludes her discussion of The Great Gatsby by evaluating the cross-mapping of the auditory and visual fields in the novel’s main pairs of characters. Beginning with an analysis of the Jazz Age, she argues that linkages between what is heard and what is seen have important implications for the overarching themes of The Great Gatsby, including notions of accountability, responsibility, illusion, and disillusion. She focuses on the linked characters of Daisy and Jordan Baker, Gatsby and Nick Carraway, to show how their convergences and divergences tell the entire store of Gatsby’s decline and fall.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:55 — 44.8MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS

Professor Wai Chee Dimock begins her discussion of The Great Gatsby by highlighting Fitzgerald’s experimental counter-realism, a quality that his editor Maxwell Perkins referred to as “vagueness.” She argues that his counter-realism comes from his animation of inanimate objects, giving human dimensions of motion and emotion to things as varied as lawns, ashes, juicers, telephones, and automobiles. She concludes with a short meditation on race in The Great Gatsby and encourages a closer reading of the novel’s instances of racial differentiation.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:55 — 45.7MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS

Professor Wai Chee Dimock continues her discussion of Hemingway’s In Our Time, testing four additional clusters of chapters and vignettes. She offers readings of each cluster that focus on Hemingway’s logics of expressivity, substitution, and emotional resilience. She concludes that Hemingway mixes tragedy and comedy as genres of writing to produce a humor that vacillates between irony and farce.

Warning: This lecture contains graphic content and/or adult language that some users may find disturbing.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:55 — 45.7MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS

Professor Wai Chee Dimock discusses Hemingway’s first book In Our Time, a collection of vignettes published in 1925 that launched Hemingway’s career as a leading American modernist. Professor Dimock examines a cluster of three vignettes from In Our Time to show how Hemingway’s laconic style naturalizes problems of pain and violence amidst the ethnic tensions of the American Midwest. Drawing on the theoretical writings of critics Elaine Scarry and Susan Sontag, and the artistic representations of painter Edvard Munch, Professor Dimock shows how language probes the empathetic boundaries of communal suffering in “Indian Camp” and “Chapter II.” She concludes with a discussion of “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” that shows how inter-ethnic conflict between Native Americans and whites is neutralized by the primitive impulse of peacekeeping, the opposite of the violence she reads in the two other vignettes in this cluster.