HomePosts Tagged "as i lay dying"

Spring 2014 Books & Film Class Topic – Faulkner & Flannery: Exploring the Southern Gothic Held Wednesdays through February 26 at UL Lafayette Instructor: Dr. Mary Ann Wilson Notes will be updated each Friday through February 28; comment to join in the discussion. On Wednesday, we delved into Faulkner's second novel As I Lay Dying. His most well known and the one that's taught in high school English, this novel has all the elements of the Southern Gothic. "You can't get more Southern Gothic than carting your mother's rotting corpse across the state for burial," says Dr. Wilson. As I Lay Dying is also one of the few books by Faulkner that has much humor in it, but not everyone in class agreed with that. Some viewed the novel as quite dark, but I can admit I chuckled a few times, especially in some scenes with Anse Bundren. It also helps to consider the time period this book is set in — the Depression-era South — and that the Bundren family is poor white trash, only a step up from the African Americans, who are mostly absent in this book. Most of them have their own motives for wanting to go to Jefferson to bury their mother,

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Spring 2014 Books & Film Class Topic – Faulkner & Flannery: Exploring the Southern Gothic Held Wednesdays through February 26 at UL Lafayette Instructor: Dr. Mary Ann Wilson Notes will be updated each Friday through February 28; comment to join in the discussion. We moved on to the Faulkner portion in this week's class, with discussion on three of his short stories and a viewing of two films based on them. The stories included his most famous, "A Rose for Emily," "Barn Burning" and "That Evening Sun." Part of the reason I'm taking this class is to expand my reading and understanding of Faulkner. His short stories — and especially these three — are the perfect place to start. "A Rose For Emily" is probably the best for showing how O'Connor was influenced by Faulkner. Southern Gothic and macabre to the max, it reads like a classic horror movie. In fact, there is a short film version of the story from 1983, starring Angelica Huston. The earliest of Faulkner's stories and the first to be published in a national magazine, "A Rose for Emily" has all of his typical themes: the relationship between parents and children, class divisions and a timeframe based on perception rather than

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September 30 kicked off the American Society of Journalists and Authors' Banned Books Week. Started in 1982, the campaign was a reaction to schools and libraries pulling books off the shelves because of their objections to language and subject matter.

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