Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Dimock introduces the class to the works of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, the premiere writers of American modernism. She orients their novels along three “scales” of interpretation: global geopolitics, experimental narration, and sensory detail. Invoking the writings of critic Paul Fussell, she argues that all three writers are united by a preoccupation with World War I and the implications that the Great War has for irony in narrative representation.
00:00 – Chapter 1. Class Logistics
00:25 – Chapter 2. Three Analytic Scales
02:00 – Chapter 3. Hemingway’s Global Vision of American
05:38 – Chapter 4. Faulkner’s Narrative Experiments of Modernism
10:11 – Chapter 5. Fitzgerald’s Sensory Details
12:05 – Chapter 6. Cross-Scale Analysis of World War I
15:59 – Chapter 8. Linguistic Taboos of War
18:36 – Chapter 7. Narrative Problems of War
20:56 – Chapter 9. The Ironies of Storytelling after World War I: Hemingway and Fitzgerald
33:02 – Chapter 10. The Idealism of War: Faulkner
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Wai Chee Dimock discusses Hemingway’s first book In Our Time, a collection of vignettes published in 1925 that launched Hemingway’s career as a leading American modernist. Professor Dimock examines a cluster of three vignettes from In Our Time to show how Hemingway’s laconic style naturalizes problems of pain and violence amidst the ethnic tensions of the American Midwest. Drawing on the theoretical writings of critics Elaine Scarry and Susan Sontag, and the artistic representations of painter Edvard Munch, Professor Dimock shows how language probes the empathetic boundaries of communal suffering in “Indian Camp” and “Chapter II.” She concludes with a discussion of “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” that shows how inter-ethnic conflict between Native Americans and whites is neutralized by the primitive impulse of peacekeeping, the opposite of the violence she reads in the two other vignettes in this cluster.
00:00 – Chapter 1. In Our Time Publication History
03:41 – Chapter 2. The Structure of In Our Time
07:57 – Chapter 3. A Possible Cluster
10:56 – Chapter 4. Theoretical Persepctives on Pain
18:29 – Chapter 5. A Close Reading of “Indian Camp”
27:33 – Chapter 6. A Close Reading of “Chapter II”
35:50 – Chapter 7. A Close Reading of “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife”
48:42 – Chapter 8. Meditations on Pain and Violence in the Proposed Cluster
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Wai Chee Dimock continues her discussion of Hemingway’s In Our Time, testing four additional clusters of chapters and vignettes. She offers readings of each cluster that focus on Hemingway’s logics of expressivity, substitution, and emotional resilience. She concludes that Hemingway mixes tragedy and comedy as genres of writing to produce a humor that vacillates between irony and farce.
Warning: This lecture contains graphic content and/or adult language that some viewers may find disturbing
00:00 – Chapter 1. New Clusters and Analytic Frameworks
05:25 – Chapter 2. Chapter Seven and “Soldier’s Home”
12:50 – Chapter 3. Chapter Nine and “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot”
25:11 – Chapter 4. The Logic of Substitution
28:19 – Chapter 5. Chapter Ten and “Cat in the Rain”
38:12 – Chapter 6. Emotional Resolution in Hemingway
40:24 – Chapter 7. Chapter Twelve and “Big Two-Hearted River”
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Wai Chee Dimock begins her discussion of The Great Gatsby by highlighting Fitzgerald’s experimental counter-realism, a quality that his editor Maxwell Perkins referred to as “vagueness.” She argues that his counter-realism comes from his animation of inanimate objects, giving human dimensions of motion and emotion to things as varied as lawns, ashes, juicers, telephones, and automobiles. She concludes with a short meditation on race in The Great Gatsby and encourages a closer reading of the novel’s instances of racial differentiation.
00:00 – Chapter 1. Maxwell Perkins and the “Vagueness” of Gatsby
03:51 – Chapter 2. The Experimentalism of The Great Gatsby
06:55 – Chapter 3. Counter-Realism in The Great Gatsby
09:37 – Chapter 4. The Animation of the Inanimate
19:28 – Chapter 5. The Human and the Machine
27:37 – Chapter 6. The Telephone
36:54 – Chapter 7. The Automobile
42:09 – Chapter 8. Race and the Automobile
46:46 – Chapter 9. Death and the Automobile
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Wai Chee Dimock concludes her discussion of The Great Gatsby by evaluating the cross-mapping of the auditory and visual fields in the novel’s main pairs of characters. Beginning with an analysis of the Jazz Age, she argues that linkages between what is heard and what is seen have important implications for the overarching themes of The Great Gatsby, including notions of accountability, responsibility, illusion, and disillusion. She focuses on the linked characters of Daisy and Jordan Baker, Gatsby and Nick Carraway, to show how their convergences and divergences tell the entire store of Gatsby’s decline and fall.
00:00 – Chapter 1. The Jazz Age and The Great Gatsby
06:03 – Chapter 2. Cross-Mapping the Sensation of Vagueness
08:15 – Chapter 3. Auditory Field with Color
10:03 – Chapter 4. Visual Field with Noise
16:15 – Chapter 5. Thematic Implications of Visual-Auditory Coupling for Daisy and Jordan
23:15 – Chapter 6. Thematic Coupling of Nick and Gatsby
34:04 – Chapter 7. Extinguishing Sound for Nick and Gatsby
40:14 – Chapter 8. Thematic Divergence between Nick and Gatsby
42:59 – Chapter 9. The Logic of Substitution for Nick Carraway
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Wai Chee Dimock begins her discussion of The Sound and the Fury by presenting Faulkner’s main sources for the novel, including Act V, Scene 5 of Macbeth and theories of mental deficiency elaborated by John Locke and Henry Goddard. Her main focus is on the experimental subjectivity of the novel’s first section which is narrated by Benjy Compson, a mentally retarded 33 year old who is completely innocent of his family’s decline and fall in 1920s Jefferson, Mississippi. Professor Dimock traces Benjy’s preoccupation with his sister Caddy and her sexual innocence through his sense of smell, and the repeated phrase “Caddy smelled like trees.” She concludes by observing that Faulkner protects Benjy from the loss of Caddy by allowing him to move seamlessly between the present and the past, shielding him in his own memories.
00:00 – Chapter 1. Images of Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi
02:39 – Chapter 2. The Genesis of The Sound and the Fury
09:20 – Chapter 3. Idiocy as Innocence in Benjy’s Section
11:17 – Chapter 4. Faulkner and John Locke
13:53 – Chapter 5. Taxonomies of Mental Deficiency
17:40 – Chapter 6. The Subjectivity of “A Tale Told By An Idiot”
20:56 – Chapter 7. Freud and the Sense of Smell
23:27 – Chapter 8. The Sense of Smell as an Index to Sexual Innocence
37:51 – Chapter 9. The Syntactic Consequences of Losing Caddy
43:54 – Chapter 10. Sheilding Benjy through Narrative
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Wai Chee Dimock continues her discussion of The Sound and the Fury by juxtaposing Quentin’s stream-of-consciousness to his brother Benjy’s narrative subjectivity. Professor Dimock argues that Faulkner uses stylistic parallels between the two sections to communicate “kinship” and “variation” between the two narrators. In her readings, she focuses on their relationship with the black characters in The Sound and the Fury, as well as their reactions to Caddy’s loss of sexual innocence. She concludes with a discussion of Quentin’s suicide as a reaction to the “second-hand tragedy” of Caddy’s pregnancy.
Warning: This lecture contains graphic content and/or adult language that some viewers may find disturbing
00:00 – Chapter 1. Kinship: Theme and Variation
04:58 – Chapter 2. The “Tomorrow” of Race” Luster
12:37 – Chapter 3. The “Tomorrow” of Race: The Deacon
20:14 – Chapter 4. Benjy’s Caddy, Quentin’s Caddy
28:22 – Chapter 5. “Sister” as a Semantic Field
33:38 – Chapter 6. Conflation of Sisters
36:45 – Chapter 7. Saint Francis and Little Sister Death
43:49 – Chapter 8. second Hand Tragedy
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Warning: This lecture contains graphic content and/or adult language that some viewers may find disturbing
Professor Wai Chee Dimock discusses Jason’s section of The Sound and the Fury with reference to Raymond Williams’s notion of the “knowable community.” Jasons’s narrative is characterized by the loss of that knowable community, by his pointed rage against his family and servants, as well as his diffuse anger against larger, unknowable entities like the “New York Jews,” Wall Street, Western Union, and the United States government. Professor Dimock reads this anger as a harbinger of the modern condition: a threatening world in which strangers and impersonality reign supreme. In her reading, she shows Faulkner expressing qualified sympathy for Jason, whose loss of a utopian model of community is represented with sadness and pathos in the final sections of the novel.
00:00 – Chapter 1. Kinship and Variation as Brotherhood
05:09 – Chapter 2. Scale Enlargement in the Jason Section
10:30 – Chapter 3. Jason and His Car
20:25 – Chapter 4. Raymond Williams and Knowable Communities
24:16 – Chapter 5. Knowable Community in Jefferson
32:10 – Chapter 6. Unknowable Communities in New York
38:57 – Chapter 7. Western Union
42:30 – Chapter 8. Faulkner’s Sympathy for Jason
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Wai Chee Dimock closes her reading of The Sound and the Fury by reading section four — the section related by an omniscient narrator — through Luster and Dilsey, the two black characters whose personal and racial histories are woven into the history of the Compson family. Luster and Dilsey’s centrality to the final section of the novel, particularly their interactions with the Reverent Shegog on Easter Sunday, transform The Sound and the Fury into a story of redemption; they reconstitute a sense of community whose loss is mourned in Jason’s section. Professor Dimock concludes by reading the final scene of section four — Jason’s taking over of the horse Queenie from Luster’s control — as Jason’s brief and heroic redemption, the only respite that Faulkner grants Jason in the course of the novel.
00:00 – Chapter 1. Why Not Caddy?
02:11 – Chapter 2. The Appendix to The Sound and the Fury
06:47 – Chapter 3. Caddy in the Appendix
12:08 – Chapter 4. Omniscient Narration, Exterior and Interior
22:52 – Chapter 5. Dilsey’s Relation to Time
30:16 – Chapter 6. The Reverent Shegog
40:10 – Chapter 7. Luster’s Resurrection of Knowledge and Community
46:04 – Chapter 8. Jason’s Redemption
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
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 viewers may find disturbing
00:00 – Chapter 1. Hemingway in Havana
04:59 – Chapter 2. Publication History of To Have and Have Not
07:40 – Chapter 3. Interconnections Between the Novels So Far
10:59 – Chapter 4. Taxonomic Groups (“Types”) in To Have and Have Not
16:45 – Chapter 5. Racism in To Have and Have Not
23:20 – Chapter 6. Harry Mogan’s Verbal Tic, “Some”
31:42 – Chapter 7. Harry Morgan as a Type
39:16 – Chapter 8. Symmetries between Harry and Other “Types”
45:39 – Chapter 9. The Celebrated Concept of the Cojones
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
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 viewers may find disturbing
00:00 – Chapter 1. The Film Version of To Have and Have Not
03:05 – Chapter 2. Criticism of To Have and Have Not
09:18 – Chapter 3. Macro History of Cuba in 1930
15:23 – Chapter 4. Harry as a Political “Have Not”
19:05 – Chapter 5. The Great Depression in To Have and Have Not
22:57 – Chapter 6. Harry as an Economic “Have Not”
24:24 – Chapter 7. Harry’s Loss of Choice as a “Have Not”
26:52 – Chapter 8. Harry as an Ironic “Have”
32:12 – Chapter 9. Harry as a Mediated “Have” Through the Eyes of Marie
36:57 – Chapter 10. Harry as a Mediated “Have” Through the Eyes of Richard Gordon
44:48 – Chapter 11. Hemingway and Joyce’s Female Soliloquies
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
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.
00:00 – Chapter 1. Individuals and Types
04:24 – Chapter 2. The Rich Boy as a Type
08:27 – Chapter 3. The Sociology of Types
14:38 – Chapter 4. Yale as a Social Marker in “The Rich Boy”
22:53 – Chapter 5. Social Profiles in “Babylon Revisited”
30:42 – Chapter 6. Social Type and Large Scale Drama in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”
40:33 – Chapter 7. Reversion to Type and Small Scale Drama in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
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.
00:00 – Chapter 1. The Odyssey and As I Lay Dying
04:34 – The Chronology of As I Lay Dying
09:51 – The Great Depression and Poor Whites
12:37 – Bakhtin and the Social Dialects of the Novel
15:38 – Chapter 5. Kermode and the Genesis of Secrets in As I Lay Dying
20:26 – Chapter 6. The Speaking Voice and Moral Responsibility of Poor Whites
30:01 – Chapter 7. Dewey Dell’s Short Term Secret
38:09 – Chapter 8. Darl, Jewel, and Dewey Dell’s Deep Rooted Secret
38:24 – Chapter 9. Dewey Dell’s Portrait of Her Brothers
43:26 – Chapter 10. Vardaman and the Speech of Children
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
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.
00:00 – Chapter 1. Humans and Non-Humans
03:50 – Chapter 2. The Epic Tradition and Homer’s Cyclops
07:56 – Chapter 3. Cross-Species Kinship in Circe’s Magic and Dante’s Inferno
09:48 – Chapter 4. Tull’s Animal Identification in As I Lay Dying
16:19 – Chapter 5. The Epic Function of Mules
21:55 – Chapter 6. Poor Whites as Buzzards
25:12 – Chapter 7. Jewel as Snake and Horse
28:22 – Chapter 8. The Mythic Horse, the Snake, and Scattered Representation
34:22 – Chapter 9. The Secretive Narrative of Jewel’s Horse
42:10 – Chapter 10. The Epic Convention of Raising the Dead
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
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.
00:00 – Chapter 1. As I Lay Dying and the American Tradition
05:48 – Chapter 2. Tragedy in The Scarlett Letter and As I Lay Dying
12:29 – Chapter 3. The Comic Dimension of the Fish
18:42 – Chapter 4. The Comic Economy of As I Lay Dying
24:47 – Chapter 5. Cash as a “Have Not”
32:09 – Chapter 6. Anse as a “Have”
34:29 – Chapter 7. Jewel’s Broken Kinship with Animals
39:48 – Chapter 8. The Reconstitution of Kinship
43:12 – Chapter 9. Darl as a “Have Not”
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
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.
00:00 – Chapter 1. Donne’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”
02:31 – Chapter 2. Historical Context of the Spanish Civil War
05:44 – Chapter 3. Low Tech and High Tech War in Robert Capa’s Photographs
11:41 – Chapter 4. Voluntary versus Involuntary Associations
15:35 – Chapter 5. Seven Fold Permutation in For Whom the Bell Tolls: Involuntary Foreigners
18:40 – Chapter 6. Linguistic Alienation for Involuntary Foreigners
25:35 – Chapter 7. Robert Jordan’s Place in the Community as an Involuntary Foreigner
31:40 – Chapter 8. Print Illiteracy and Literacy for Involuntary Foreigners
36:02 – Chapter 9. Technological Illiteracy for Involuntary Foreigners
44:55 – Chapter 10. The Tomorrow of the Spanish
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
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.
00:00 – Chapter 1. Distant Home versus On-Site Environment
03:13 – Chapter 2. Paris as a Distant Home
12:11 – Chapter 3. America as a Distant Home
18:40 – Chapter 4. Gypsies and Moors in the On-Site Environment
26:56 – Chapter 5. Lynching in the Distant Home
34:30 – Chapter 6. Lynching and the Moors in the On-Site Environment
37:10 – Chapter 7. Tragedy and Comedy in the Republican Misunderstanding
39:55 – Chapter 8. The Civil War as a Distant Home
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Wai Chee Dimock focuses on the themes of dying and not dying that reappear throughout For Whom the Bell Tolls. Marshaling Elaine Scarry’s argument on the aesthetics of killing, she reads the execution of the Fascists as a representation of both aesthetic and ethical “ugliness” in death. She then turns to a discussion of the tragic-comic dimensions of not dying as depicted in the bullfighter Finito’s refusal to die and the smell of death emanating from the old women in the Madrid marketplace. She concludes with a reading of the word cobarde — coward — as it is applied to both Robert Jordan’s suicidal father and the indomitable Pablo.
Warning: This lecture contains graphic content and/or adult language that some viewers may find disturbing
00:00 – Chapter 1. The American Civil War as a Distant Home
06:08 – Chapter 2. Hemingway’s Suicide
09:39 – Chapter 3. Varieties of Dying: The Execution of the Fascists
16:52 – Chapter 4. The Aesthetics of Killing
25:03 – Chapter 5. Varieties of Not Dying: The Death of Bullfighter Finito
29:37 – Chapter 6. Varities of Death: The Tragic-Comic Smell of Death
34:52 – Chapter 7. Varieties of Dying: The Tragic-Comic Rewriting of “The Earth Moved”
40:18 – Chapter 8. Varieties of Dying: Robert’s Father as Cobarde
44:51 – Chapter 9. Varieties of Not Dying: Pablo as Cobarde
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Wai Chee Dimock concludes her discussion of For Whom the Bell Tolls by reading the novel as a narrative of dispossession and repossession. She argues that the rape of Maria, which takes place in front of a barbershop mirror, enacts one type of disempowerment; the end of Robert Jordan’s life represents another, but with the potential for redemption. She shows how Jordan vacillates between a “have” and a “have not,” depending on how ironically one understands Maria’s question “What hast thou?”
00:00 – Chapter 1. A Women’s War
04:40 – Chapter 2. Symmetry of Brutality and Narration in Hemingway
15:19 – Chapter 3. The Dispossession of Rape
21:42 – Chapter 4. Dispossession for Robert
24:54 – Chapter 5. Robert as a “Have Not”
33:59 – Chapter 6. The Removal of Narrative from Robert Jordan
40:32 – Chapter 7. Robert Jordan’s Repossession
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Wai Chee Dimock positions her reading of Tender Is the Night alongside F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career as a Hollywood screenwriter. She shows how the novel borrows narrative techniques from film, particularly flashback, “switchability” on a macro and micro scale, and montage. Invoking the theories of Sergei Eisenstein, she reads scenes of wartime death and individual murder to show how love and war are cross-mapped, superimposed onto one another as part of the narrative fabric of Tender Is the Night.
00:00 – Chapter 1. “Ode to a Nightingale” and the Glamor of Tender Is the Night
03:47 – Chapter 2. The Influence of Hollywood on Fitzgerald’s Work
08:28 – Chapter 3. The Publication History of Tender Is the Night
12:01 – Chapter 4. Switchability on the Micro Scale
18:00 – Chapter 5. “Hard” and “Pitiful”
27:20 – Chapter 6. Montage as a Narrative Technique
32:51 – Chapter 7. The Superimposition of Love and War on a Macro Scale
39:19 – Chapter 8. The Superimposition of Love and War on the Micro Scale
43:38 – Chapter 9. A Cinematic Rendition of Murder
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Wai Chee Dimock concludes her discussion of Tender Is the Night with a biographical sketch of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s mental instability, the inspiration for the character of Nicole Diver. Invoking the schema of “have” and “have not,” she then shows how Fitzgerald borrows techniques from film to quicken the pace of Dick Diver’s narrative of dispossession. Dimock argues that Fitzgerald uses close-up, cross-cutting, and the speeding up of negative resolutions to strip Dick of his professional identity and to render him empty-handed at the end.
00:00 – Chapter 1. The Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayer
10:52 – Chapter 2. Have and Have Not as Types in Tender Is the Night
17:00 – Chapter 3. Rosemary and Dick as Actors
24:10 – Chapter 4. The Close-Up as a Narrative Technique
36:30 – Chapter 5. Cross-Cutting as a Narrative Technique
13:59 – Chapter 6. Racialization in Fitzgerald
40:50 – Chapter 7. Cross-Cutting to Nicole’s Judgment of Dick
44:29 – Chapter 8. The Speed of the Negative Resolution to Tender Is the Night
48:57 – Chapter 9. The Intrusion of World War I into Marriage
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Wai Chee Dimock focuses her introductory lecture on Faulkner’s Light in August on the “pagan quality” of his protagonist Lena. She argues that Faulkner uses Lena to update the classic story of the unwed mother by fusing comedy with the epic road novel. In doing so, he also updates the Greek tradition of the kindness of strangers, drawing attention to it through certain stylistic markers, including the “switchability” between the protagonist and her supporting cast, the use of gerunds as a linguistic safe haven for Lena, and the allegorical naming of Byron and Burden as social types with scripted trajectories.
00:00 – Chapter 1. The Pagan Quality of Lena and Light in August
08:10 – Chapter 2. Updating the Story of the Unwed Mother as Comedy
16:17 – Chapter 3. Light in August as Faulkner’s Epic Road Novel
21:12 – Chapter 4. The Kindness of Strangers
33:42 – Chapter 5. The Switchability of Lena as Protagonist and the Supporting Cast
36:09 – Chapter 6. Switchability Between the Weighty and the Mundane
39:19 – Chapter 7. Faulkner’s Stylized Use of Gerunds
43:08 – Chapter 8. Allegorical Names and Types
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Wai Chee Dimock continues her discussion of Light in August by showing how the kindness of strangers turns into malice in the cases of social reformer Joanna Burden and Reverend Hightower. Whereas that malice assumes comedic tones in the depiction of Joanna’s death, it has more complex valences in the case of Reverend Hightower, who is both ethically delicate towards his neighbors and insensitive to his adulterous wife. Professor Dimock concludes by observing the kinship between the dual narratives of Lena Grove and Joe Christmas as, respectively, the undramatic and dramatic strands of the novel. Drawing on her reading from last lecture, she shows how both Joe and Lena’s consciousness is marked by the gerund form and a passivity of agency that makes them receptacles for the dramatic actions of others.
Warning: This lecture contains graphic content and/or adult language that some viewers may find disturbing
00:00 – Chapter 1. Christianity and Southern Hospitality
04:30 – Chapter 2. The Neighbor as Political Theology
07:06 – Chapter 3. The Resentment of Southerners for Northern Abolitionists
10:52 – Chapter 4. Tragedy as Comedy in the Death of Joanna Burden
19:07 – Chapter 5. The Reverend Hightower and the Malice of Strangers
24:07 – Chapter 6. The Ethical Challenge of Hightower
33:56 – Chapter 7. The Switchability of Joe Christmas and Lena Grove
38:41 – Chapter 8. Kinship Between Lena Grove and Joe Christmas
42:44 – Chapter 9. The Passivity of Lena Grove and Joe Christmas
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Wai Chee Dimock focuses on the unresolved problem of race in Light in August, focusing her discussion on the variety of reflexive and calculated uses of the word “nigger” as a charged term toward Joe Christmas. She shows how the semantic burden of the word varies — used under duress by Joe Brown and the dietician, deliberately made light of by Hightower and Bobbie, fused with the contrary meanings of Calvinist theology by Joanna Burden, and finally ironized by Joe Christmas himself. Dimock uses these multiple uses of the word “nigger” to meditate on the making of racial identities and our collective input into that process.
Warning: This lecture contains graphic content and/or adult language that some viewers may find disturbing
00:00 – Chapter 1. The Unresolved Problem of Race in Light in August
07:01 – Chapter 2. Joe Brown’s Involuntary Use of the Word “Nigger”
09:45 – Chapter 3. The Dietitian’s Involuntary Use of the Word “Nigger”
14:01 – Chapter 4. The Dietician’s Instrumental Usage of the Word “Nigger”
16:54 – Chapter 5. Hightower’s Agonized Usage of the Word “Nigger”
19:37 – Chapter 6. The Doubleness of Hightower as Metaphor
21:31 – Chapter 7. Bobbie’s Trivial Usage of the Word “Nigger”
23:57 – Chapter 8. Bobbie’s Involuntary Use of the World “Nigger”
26:58 – Chapter 9. Joanna Burden’s Emotional Response to the World “Nigger” as an Eternal Curse
34:47 – Chapter 10. The Burden’s Calvinist Genealogy
39:38 – Chapter 11. Joanna Burden’s Licentious Use of the Word “Negro”
47:03 – Chapter 12. Joe Christmas’s Ironic Use of the Word “Nigger”
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)
Professor Wai Chee Dimock concludes her discussion of Light in August and the semester by mapping Faulkner’s theology of Calvinist predestination onto race. Using Nella Larsen’s novel Passing as an intertext, she shows how Joe Christmas’s decision to self-blacken expresses his tragic sense of being predestined, of always “coming second.” Moving away from tragedy, Dimock reads Hightower’s delivery of Lena’s baby as inhabiting a liminal space between tragedy and comedy, as Faulkner gives Hightower a second chance at meaningful communal agency. She finishes by reading Lena Grove and Byron Bunch’s courtship as the comic end of Light in August.
Warning: This lecture contains graphic content and/or adult language that some viewers may find disturbing
00:00 – Chapter 1. “Passing” in Light in August
06:12 – Chapter 2. Joe Christmas’s Redoubled Double-Consciousness
10:01 – Chapter 3. The Symbolic Pattern of Lighting a Match
18:07 – Chapter 4. The Racialized Predestination of Joe Christmas
22:52 – Chapter 5. Joe Christmas’s Lack of Agency
29:43 – Chapter 6. Hightower as the Midpoint Between Joe Christmas and Lena Grove
33:28 – Chapter 7. Giving Hightower a Second Chance
39:38 – Chapter 8. The Wisdom of Crowds
43:52 – Chapter 9. Faulkner’s Use of the Kindness of Strangers as a Multitude
46:23 – Chapter 10. Faulkner on Marriage
Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu
This course was recorded in Fall 2011.
Lecture 6: Vision 2 Instructor: John Gabrieli View the complete course: http://ocw.mit.edu/9-00SCS11 License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
More information at http://ocw.mit.edu/terms
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