William Faulkner's Civil War
LIT3-10-Thu3
Vincent Canzoneri
This course will take place in person at 60 Turner Street. The room will be equipped with a HEPA air purifier.
10 week course - March 13 - May 22
(No Class April 17)
In this course, we will read Professor Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words – William Faulkner’s Civil War, which was hailed in 2020 by critics as “the first book on Faulkner to which newcomers might wish to turn.” Blending literary analysis with history, biography, and personal narrative, it explores what Faulkner can tell us about the Civil War and what the war can tell us about Faulkner. In the words of Drew Gilpin Faust, it is a “meditation on the meaning of the ‘forever war’ of race, not just in American history and literature, but in our own fraught time.” Quite brazenly, Professor Gorra treats the entire Faulkner oeuvre as one sprawling tale, seen whole through its time-warped incidents and characters. The group leader comes to this course with both an understanding of the Civil War and a fascination with Faulkner. Informed by Professor Gorra’s book and selections from The Unvanquished – short stories actually set in the Civil War era – we will learn how the Civil War permeated and drove William Faulkner’s fiction.
More facilitated discussion than lecture.
Required Texts: Paperback version of The Saddest Words – William Faulkner’s Civil War by Michael Gorra (2020), available from Amazon for $16.95, and The Unvanquished, Corrected Text, available from Amazon for $15.00. Additional materials will be provided on a class website.
Approximately 35 pages of text per week, plus readings of excerpts from novels that Professor Gorra discussed; approximately 3 hours of preparation per week.
Vince Canzoneri is a semi-retired attorney who reads more history than fiction. He was raised in Kansas as the cellist in a family string quartet, studied Chinese and American history in college, and has worked as a television critic and documentary producer. Last term, he led his first BOLLI course, entitled The Civil War in American Memory.