Location CCC 227
Time/Date: 4pm May 4, 2023
Recent critical interest in William Faulkner’s responses to and constructions of the American Civil War raise deeper questions about how the residual trauma from that conflict inform and infect the writer’s work. The obvious observation, though, that “the war was really important,” mis-underestimates the influence of another, more immediate conflict, and misses entirely the ripples and echoes that both these wars trace across the body of Faulkner’s fiction.
Examination of Faulkner’s response to his generation’s war, the Great one, reveals a pattern, a rhetoric, that informs Faulkner’s representations of war and suggests that he deploys scenes of violence to enact culture-wide strategies for coping with catastrophic loss.
Join English Professor David Arnold for the final Faculty Forum of the spring semester.