William Faulkner was the greatest and one of the most prolific of American novelists. Between 1928 and 1962, he wrote seventeen novels and numerous short stories.
Faulkner was born in Oxford, Mississippi in 1897, and died there in 1962. Most of his novels are set in his mythical "Yoknapatawphna County" in northern Mississippi.
He published his first novel in 1928. Our novel is his sixth, published in 1932. It is a beautiful, moving, and yet sometimes brutal novel set in the American South.
We will spend the term reading and discussing Light in August. So that we can discuss the novel intelligently, all on the same page, we will all need to purchase the Vintage Classics edition.
If we have time, at the end of the term, we will also read and discuss A Lesson Before Dying, a short novel by Ernest J. Gaines (1993). It is a novel similar to Light in August in some ways, but by a black American. We will use the Vintage Contemporaries edition.
Requirements for the course are close reading, intelligent class participation, weekly "scribbles," and a seminar paper. |
