Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner
By Wai Chee Dimock
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Description
This course examines major works by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, exploring their interconnections on three analytic scales: the macro history of the United States and the world; the formal and stylistic innovations of modernism; and the small details of sensory input and psychic life. Warning: Some of the lectures in this course contain graphic content and/or adult language that some users may find disturbing.
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1 – Introduction | 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, exper | 9/1/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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2 – Hemingway’s In Our Time | 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 | 9/5/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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3 – Hemingway’s In Our Time, Part II | 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 emotio | 9/8/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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4 – Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby | 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 | 9/13/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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5 – Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Part II | 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 betw | 9/15/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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6 – Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury | 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 f | 9/20/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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7 – Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Part II | 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 t | 9/22/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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8 – Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Part III | 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 r | 9/27/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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9 – Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Part IV | 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 h | 9/29/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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10 – Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not | 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 (“ty | 10/4/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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11 – Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, Part II | 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 Har | 10/6/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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12 – Fitzgerald’s Short Stories | 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 iden | 10/11/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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13 – Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying | 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, s | 10/13/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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14 – Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Part II | 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 r | 10/18/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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15 – Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Part III | 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 cont | 10/20/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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16 – Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls | 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 th | 10/25/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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17 – Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Part II | 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 Mis | 10/27/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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18 – Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Part III | 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 b | 11/1/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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19 – Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Part IV | 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 | 11/3/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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20 – Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night | 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 | 11/8/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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21 – Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, Part II | 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, | 11/10/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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22 – Faulkner’s Light in August | 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 e | 11/15/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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23 – Faulkner’s Light in August, Part II | 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 depic | 11/17/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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24 – Faulkner’s Light in August, Part III | 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 “n****r” as a charged term toward Joe Christmas. She shows how the semantic b | 11/29/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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25 – Faulkner’s Light in August, Part IV | 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 | 12/2/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Customer Reviews
The Sound & the Fury
An absolutely stunning reading of Faulkner’s The Sound & the Fury. The recapitulation of the novel’s operative themes, events, and major questions was more coherent than any other lecture I’ve encountered.
Hemminhway
Bad sound.
Umm
Too many uums, and also many words difficult to comprehend. Not an enjoyable lecture. This is literature, we’re not here solely to gather facts but to enjoy the delivery.
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