ENGL5032 · English

Seminar: Welty and Faulkner: Style and the Conflictual Histories of America and the South

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

Eudora Welty and William Faulkner were born in Mississippi just over a decade apart. In readings of their major texts, we will explore the formal and stylistic complexities of writers who, inimitably local in subject matter, paint the South, and beyond it, America itself, with unsparing rigor. Few writers are as lucid about the fractures of the nations bloody and conflictual history; few writers are more illuminating, even in their obfuscations, about categories such as race, class, and gender. We will attempt to do justice to the conceptual challenges and stylistic beauty of two of the twentieth centurys greatest writers.