Congrats are in order to our own Saida Bogdanovich, who won this year’s Mary McElligott Gloster Prize for her essay, “The Merchant of Venice: The Dismissal and Duplication of Jewish Stereotypes.”
Who new we were within Zoom range of greatness a couple of times a week?!
The computer scientist Charles Hannon has done amazing work in visualizing various aspects of literature: part of what we call the “digital humanities.” Here is a blog post that argues that Faulkner’s “network” in the novel was influenced by the expanse of “rural electification” in the mid-1930s in the rural South. And here’s the diagram, which we’ll look at today:
…bet you never thought you’d see that title, I bet. Florencia sent me a link to this bit from SNL, which is especially relevant in light of the section of the novel we read for yesterday, in which blackness seems to infect Christmas’s feet and grow, zombie-like, upwards.
Here the story is the same, if the mood is comic rather than tragic. If nothing else, the skit pulls back the veil that might make us thing that the citizens of Jefferson express ideas about race that are utterly foreign to 2020…
You have your second entry in our encyclopedic guide to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha Co. next week. Note: since a lot of medium-length entries already exist for TSAF and AILD, you are free to substitute either three short entries or one normal blog post (on any topic you like). Here are some useful materials and guidelines:
As discussed, here is the template document that you’ll use to create your own exam document, write your exam, and share with me:
Don’t sleep on the directions! The step-by-step should be clear, but you have to follow the steps carefully.
Feel free to reach out with questions. If the tech side is really problematic, you can email me your answers in a pinch. But please try to follow the steps.
He looks like right after the maul hits the steer and it is no longer alive and dont yet know that it is dead.
As I Lay Dying, p. 173
It’s not about Faulkner, per se, but a student in another course sent me this poem from the contemporary African American poet Claudia Rankine. If Jason is a Trumpist before such a thing existed, I think we can see echoes of themes in Faulkner’s novel at work in Rankine’s moving meditation on the barriers to self-reflection that seem to be built into whiteness in the US:
I’ve just read all the posts from the first deadline and wow: I’m really impressed with the rigor of your reading and writing on this very challenging text. Many of you are already writing at a very high level; all of you are putting out admirable effort both as reader and writers. I could have shouted out nearly any of the authors/posts, so high was the quality, but this time I’ll give special commendation to:
None of these is perfect, whatever that would mean, and no one should look for a cookie cutter to use for these assignments. But all three share the quality of finding something specific in the text to hone in on, something that is “weird” enough to make us read the text in a new way.
Thought you might appreciate a post on the New York Review of Books site on Faulkner. Michael Gorra observes that Faulkner was steeped in the culture and politics of the “Jim Crow” era of radical segregation that dominated the U.S. South between 1875 and the late 1960s (and beyond). There are references to several of the novels we will read, including TSAF, LIA, and AA:
A central feature of this course will be the writing we do on this site. In what follows, I will outline three things:
First things first: why blog?
1. Blogging is sharable: rather than have a private circuit between you and me, we have a much more dynamic conversation across the entire class.
2. Blogging is public, sort of: I like the idea that we are responsible for our ideas in front of broader audiences. In practical terms, I doubt anyone is listening in most of the time, but I think it’s important that we roll up our sleeves and defend our arguments in an open and public forum as often as possible. And of course, you can show your family/friends/pets what we’ve been up to in class. For those who have reservations about privacy, note that a) you can only be identified via firstname+last initial, so you have relative privacy beyond our class; and b) you are free to delete your posts at the end of class. If anyone has serious reservations despite all this, feel free to contact me. A fuller accounting of rights/responsibilities is here.
3. Blogging is sturdy: rather than forget the piece of paper once it’s been handed back, we can link back to prior statements or observations, or to each others’. If you like, you can leave your posts up for future students to see.
4. Blogging is responsive: rather than only getting comments from me, you’ll comment on and get comments on each other’s work.
So how do you post? Here’s a quick guide to posting on WordPress for newbies. It’s super easy once you figure it out the first time. So here goes:
1. LOG ON: anyone can see the blog site, but only those logged on as “authors” can post. If you simply click on the link you received when I invited you, you can follow the prompts to log in. Two helpful hints:
a) you can always tell when you’re logged in, since there’s a slim black bar across the top that looks like this:
and b), if you ever want to go straight to the “back end” of the site (called the “dashboard” in WP parlance), throw “admin” on the end of the URL. So, jallred.net/wordpress/faulkner takes you to the site, whereas jallred.net/wordpress/faulkner/admin takes you to the login dialogue and then to the “dashboard.” Try it.
2. START A POST: there are several ways to post. Here’s the easiest: click the <+ NEW> icon in the top middle of the screen and select “post.” It looks like this:
3. WRITE SOMETHING: “New Post” will take you to a basic text editor. So write something. If you want to get fancy, you can add italics, bold, indentation, insert images or other media, and whatnot. But most of the time you’ll just try to write some reasonable sentences. When you’re done, click PUBLISH on the right (see image below). Or, if you’re not quite ready, you can save it as a draft and reopen it later, via the “POSTS” section of the dashboard. Helpful hint: WordPress autosaves your work every few seconds, so it’s very, very rare to lose stuff. Nonetheless it’s not a bad idea to compose posts on a word processor and then paste them into WP just in case. I personally live dangerously most of the time and have never lost anything, but your call.
We’re good, right? Happy blogging.
What makes for an excellent post? For this class, posts should:
Here’s a simple rubric, adapted from Mark Sample, that I will use to evaluate your work (see how the academic blogosphere encourages sharing and exchange? I told you so!):
| Rating | Characteristics |
| 4 | Exceptional. The post is focused and coherently integrates examples with explanations or analysis. It moves beyond summary to engage the text critically, giving a sharp, original close reading. It makes useful connections to other texts and raises novel questions. It points out aspects of the text that will surprise and stimulate the casual reader: “why didn’t I think of that?!” |
| 3 | Satisfactory. The post is reasonably focused, and explanations or analysis are mostly based on examples or other evidence. It provides a dutiful reading of primary text but fails to engage the text more than glancingly. The entry reflects moderate engagement with the topic and/or rehashes what was said in class. |
| 2 | Underdeveloped. The post is restricted to summary, without consideration of alternative perspectives, and may contain misreadings of the text at one or more points. The entry reflects passing engagement with the topic. |
| 1 | Limited. The journal entry is unfocused, or simply rehashes others’ comments; it fails to grasp fundamental aspects of the argument. |
| 0 | No Credit. The journal entry is missing or consists of one or two disconnected sentences. |
Last but not least, here’s an example of a good-looking post. We won’t read The Unvanquished this time, so the particulars won’t be familiar. But note how the author:
Your results may vary, and that’s fine. I just wanted you to see what I consider strong work before you launch into it yourselves.
