Beginning in April, Philip Weinstein will present a nine week seminar on the master works of William Faulkner. The seminar will be hosted on Zoom by Swarthmore College's Lifelong Learning program, weekly on Wednesdays from 7:00 to 8:30 pm, April 7th through June 2.
Professor Weinstein and Lifelong Learning Swarthmore have generously arranged for Vineyard library patrons to participate in this program at no charge. In order to sign up for complimentary access, please register through the library's event calendar. Zoom login will be sent to registered library participants prior to the first session on April 7th.
William Faulkner—arguably America’s greatest 20th-century novelist and Nobel Laureate in 1949—launched his career as a Joyce-inspired modernist. But, a lifelong Southerner, Faulkner found his supreme subject in his country’s ordeal of race. Following the poetic stream of consciousness of The Sound and the Fury (1929), the fallout of racial brutality in the South lodges at the center of Light in August (1932). The human cost of racism attains its furthest historical and emotional resonance in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), evincing, as Phil writes, “Faulkner’s widest grasp of the racial nightmare coiled at the heart of American history.”
Each novel will be explored in three sessions. The first session, on April 7, is on chapter one (the Benjy chapter) of The Sound and the Fury; and session two, on April 14, is on chapter two (the Quentin chapter). The novel as a whole will be discussed in session three (April 21). The longer text of Light in August will be roughly divided into three sessions (April 28, May 5, 12). Discussion of the uniquely challenging—and rewarding—Absalom, Absalom! will take up the last three classes (May 19, 26, June 2).
Philip M. Weinstein is Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English Emeritus at Swarthmore College. His numerous publications include Faulkner’s Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns (1992), What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison (1996), and Becoming Faulkner (2009), and is currently working on a book of essays entitled Soul-Error. Professor Weinstein has been offering literary seminars in cooperation with the Vineyard Haven Public Library since 2012, and is the Honorary Co-Chair of the Capital Campaign for Vineyard Haven Library's expansion and renovation project.
Please register through the library's event calendar: https://bit.ly/30vaey9
Zoom login will be sent to all registered participants prior to the first session on April 7th
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