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Professor Wai Chee Dimock continues her discussion of For Whom the Bell Tolls by analyzing the contrast Robert Jordan draws between “distant homes” and the on-site environment of the Spanish Civil War. She juxtaposes his invocations of Paris and Missouri to the rooted communities of the guerillas, and reads analogies of racial and ethnic conflict–specifically, the references to the Moors in Spain and persecuted blacks in America–as a point of tension, an ironic commentary on the coexistence of the distant home and the on-site environment. She concludes with a reading of the American Civil War as a temporally distant home which Jordan tries to recuperate in the present moment of European conflict.

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Professor Wai Chee Dimock begins her discussion of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls with an overview of the Spanish Civil War, the historical event at the heart of the novel. She introduces the notion of an “involuntary foreigner” to discuss the fate of Hemingway’s American protagonist Robert Jordan, as well as the Spanish guerillas who are turned into “aliens” within their own country due to their print and technological illiteracies. Professor Dimock concludes by connecting one’s status as an involuntary foreigner to the shape of the future, arguing that these characters have a tenuous claim to a Spain dominated by the Fascists, and to a modernity increasingly dominated by technology.

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Professor Wai Chee Dimock concludes her discussion of As I Lay Dying with an analysis of its generic form. Using Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter to anchor her discussion of the American literary tradition, she argues that As I Lay Dying continually negotiates the comic and the tragic genres as we shift from one perspective to another: one character’s comic gain is often another’s tragic loss. She traces the losses and gains of Cash, Jewel, and Darl throughout the novel, showing how their new “balances” by the end reconstitute the Bundren family and draw lines of kinship around the “haves” and “have nots” among family members.

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Professor Wai Chee Dimock traces Faulkner’s appropriation of the epic genre through two conventions: the blurring of boundaries between humans and non-humans and the resurrection of the dead. She first reads Faulkner’s minor character Tull and his relation to both mules and buzzards to draw out the “nature of manhood in poor whites.” From Tull, she shifts focus to Jewel and suggests that his kinship with the snake and the horse foregrounds the narrative secrecy of Jewel’s genealogy. As Addie Bundren’s monologue reveals, Jewel’s illegitimate father, the Reverend Whitfield, is similarly identified with both the horse, as the animal he rides, and the snake, whose Edenic behavior he parallels in his affair with Addie.

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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.

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Professor Wai Chee Dimock demonstrates how four of Fitzgerald’s most famous short stories–“The Rich Boy,” “Babylon Revisited,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” and “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”–represent “social types,” generic identities that Fitzgerald explores as forms of social reality. She reads the dramatic tension in each of those stories as determined by the protagaonist’s conformity to or deviation from their idealized social type.

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Professor Wai Chee Dimock concludes her discussion of To Have and Have Not by showing how, in the context of the Cuban Revolutions and the Great Depression, characters devolve into those who “Have” and those who “Have Not.” While protagonist Harry Morgan may look like a political and economic “Have Not”–he neither supports the revolution nor possesses enough money to extract himself from its seedier operations–his ability to bring happiness to his wife Marie makes him a social “Have” in a more profound sense. Dimock casts Harry as a “mediated Have,” someone who, through the eyes of others, might be said to be in possession of something vital, denied to others with material and political satisfactions.

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

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Professor Wai Chee Dimock introduces the class to Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not, which originally appeared as a series of short stories in Cosmopolitan and Esquire magazines. She focuses on Hemingway’s designation of taxanomic groups (“types”) by race, class, and sexuality, arguing that Hemingway’s switch of narrative perspectives throughout the course of the novel casts every character, even protagonist Harry Morgan, as a classifiable kind of human being. In her treatment of types, she shows how Hemingway draws thematic parallels between seemingly disparate racial types, complicating the dualism of “to have” and “have not” that appears in the title.

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