S25-41 William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses--A Failed Paradise
Class | Registration opens 3/3/2025 9:00 AM
Whenever William Faulkner’s fiction is discussed, the novels The Sound & the Fury and Absalom, Absalom invariably come up. They are certainly great novels, but he wrote other great novels also. One of them is Go Down, Moses, which challenges readers with its structure and complexity. Composed of seven seemingly unrelated stories and set in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County in northern Mississippi, the book focuses on the McCaslin family and plantation, portraying them in a dynamic, mythical, generational, and historical context. Faulkner dramatizes race relation issues relating not only to slaves, but to Native Americans as well, beginning well before the Emancipation Proclamation, through Reconstruction, and into the Jim Crow era. Close reading and analysis will reveal the stories’ interconnectedness, and will guide readers through the abrupt time shifts, multiple narrators, and interior monologues. Handouts, including maps and genealogies, will help the challenge of this book and hopefully make it one of the great reading experiences of our lives. We will use the Vintage edition--from Random House.
Leonard Engel
Leonard Engel, Professor Emeritus of English at Quinnipiac University, served as Chair of the English Dept for 18 years; in 1989, he was selected “Outstanding Faculty of the Year”; in 2013, he received Quinnipiac’s “Excellence in Teaching Award.” He has edited seven collections of essays beginning with The Big Empty: Essays on the Land as Narrative in 1994 and concluding with The Films of Clint Eastwood: Critical Perspectives in 2018. He has written many articles on American literature and film, from Poe and Melville to the present; most recently--“Charles Portis and True Grit,” (Summer 2021), and “Thoreau, Whitman, and Abbey: Down the River and on the Open Road,” (Fall 2021) both published in Journal of the West.