Today's Course
25-lecture Course: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner with Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University
About the Course: 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.
Professor: Wai Chee Dimock
Lecture 1:
Professor Dimock introduces the class to the works of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, the premiere writers of American modernism.
Lecture 2:
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.
Lecture 3:
Professor Wai Chee Dimock continues her discussion of Hemingway's In Our Time, testing four additional clusters of chapters and vignettes.
Lecture 4:
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."
Lecture 5:
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.
Lecture 6:
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.
Lecture 7:
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.
Lecture 8:
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."
Lecture 9:
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 history of the Compson family.
Lecture 10:
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.
Lecture 11:
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."
Lecture 12:
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 identities that Fitzgerald explores as forms of social reality.
Lecture 13:
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.
Lecture 14:
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.
Lecture 15:
Professor Wai Chee Dimock concludes her discussion of As I Lay Dying with an analysis of its generic form.
Lecture 16:
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.
Lecture 17:
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.
Lecture 18:
Professor Wai Chee Dimock focuses on the themes of dying and not dying that reappear throughout For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Lecture 19:
Professor Wai Chee Dimock concludes her discussion of For Whom the Bell Tolls by reading the novel as a narrative of dispossession and repossession.
Lecture 20:
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 macro and micro scale, and montage.
Lecture 21:
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.
Lecture 22:
Professor Wai Chee Dimock focuses her introductory lecture on Faulkner's Light in August on the "pagan quality" of his protagonist Lena.
Lecture 23:
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.
Lecture 24:
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 "nigger" as a charged term toward Joe Christmas.
Lecture 25:
Professor Wai Chee Dimock concludes her discussion of Light in August and the semester by mapping Faulkner's theology of Calvinist predestination onto race.
Texts:
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Knopf Doubleday, 1991.
Faulkner, William. Light in August. Knopf Doubleday, 1991.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Knopf Doubleday, 1991.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Scribner, 2004.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection. Scribner, 1995.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. Scribner, 1995.
Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Scribner, 1995.
Hemingway, Ernest. In Our Time. Scribner, 1996.
Hemingway, Ernest. To Have and Have Not. Scribner, 1996.
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