教學大綱 Syllabus

課程簡介Course Description

The literature of the high modernists is often criticized for its lack of engagement in society and its predilection for imagistic abstraction and the highly aestheticized experimentation of a self-reflexive, self-contained poetics. This course will explore the fault lines of this critical assessment, laying out some of the key techniques and thematic preoccupations of high modernism and concentrating on the ways in which William Faulkner adapted them to engage his Southern heritage, not only the antebellum plantation system, but also the New South that followed its demise with its sharecropping and emergent industrialization.  In his portrayal of the effects of violence on identity, the dynamics of social control and conditioning, and issues of race in the American South, Faulkner endeavored to understand the nature of power itself, using his fictional Mississippi county as a stage for how power relationships manifest themselves in communities and among individuals. We will read three classic Faulkner texts and place them in a larger critical discussion about modern form, the postmodern turn as well as postcolonial perspectives.  In addition, we will explore a Faulkner digital humanities project called Digital Yoknapatawpha, based at the University of Virginia.  Using its database of interactive maps to aid our progress, we will engage in a number of key theoretical issues regarding the rise of the Digital Humanities.