Syllabus: Literature CS 111

What Happens in Yoknapatawpha County Stays in Yoknapatawpha County

Spring 2016

Enroll Code: 28001.

Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Email: patrickmooney AT umail DOT ucsb DOT edu
Voicemail: (805) 272-0069
Office Location: CCS Office Trailer #1002.
Class Meetings: Tu/Th 4:00–5:20; Bldg 494, room 160B.
Office Hours: Tu 2:30–3:30 and Th 1:00–2:00, or by appointment.

• 2016-03-29T14:30:00–03-29-2016T15:30:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-03-31T13:00:00–03-31-2016T14:00:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-04-05T14:30:00–04-05-2016T15:30:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-04-07T13:00:00–04-07-2016T14:00:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-04-12T14:30:00–04-12-2016T15:30:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-04-14T13:00:00–04-14-2016T14:00:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-04-19T14:30:00–04-19-2016T15:30:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-04-21T13:00:00–04-21-2016T14:00:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-04-26T14:30:00–04-26-2016T15:30:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-04-28T13:00:00–04-28-2016T14:00:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-05-03T14:30:00–05-03-2016T15:30:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-05-05T13:00:00–05-05-2016T14:00:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-05-10T14:30:00–05-10-2016T15:30:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-05-12T13:00:00–05-12-2016T14:00:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-05-17T14:30:00–05-17-2016T15:30:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-05-19T13:00:00–05-19-2016T14:00:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-05-24T14:30:00–05-24-2016T15:30:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-05-26T13:00:00–05-26-2016T14:00:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-05-31T14:30:00–05-31-2016T15:30:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002
• 2016-06-02T13:00:00–06-02-2016T14:00:00: Patrick Mooney's office hours, CCS Office Trailer #1002

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Course Description

This quarter, we'll be reading six of William Faulkner's most powerful novels and looking at the construction of his apocryphal county—its geography, its history, its cultures, and its people. We'll be closely reading both a selection of his earlier, much-read texts that are thought to be central to his work and a selection of his later, less-canonical-but-still-rewarding texts that flesh out the boundaries—geographical, temporal, ideological, imaginary—of Faulkner's little postage stamp of native soil.

Throughout the quarter, we'll be looking at Faulkner's continuing revisions and refinements of the history and mythology of Yoknapatawpha County and the re-inscription of stories that recur throughout Faulkner's career in his world- (well ... county-) building exercise, looking at how his earlier concerns during his formally experimental high modernist period continue into the mature narratives of his later work, just as his packet of fictional land is connected inextricably to the symbolics, the history, and the culture of the real (in whatever senses we take that word to have meaning) American South. Along the way, we'll be building very close reading skills, teasing out more meaning than you may have previously believed possible from short passages of text; looking very closely at such writerly concerns as phrase and sentence construction; and looking at the details of plot and character construction.

Course work will involve a moderately heavy reading load, a reading journal to be shared and commented upon, and (for those taking the course for four or more units) a final project.

Texts to Purchase

• William Faulkner, Sanctuary (1931), ISBN 978-0-679-74814-4.
• William Faulkner, Light in August (1932), ISBN 978-0-679-73226-6.
• William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936), ISBN 978-0-679-73218-1.
• William Faulkner, The Hamlet (1940), ISBN 978-0-679-73653-0.
• William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1951), ISBN 978-0-307-94680-5.
• William Faulkner, The Town (1957), ISBN 978-0-307-94680-5.

These texts are available in the UCen Bookstore or online through the normal retail channels. Personally, I frequently use alibris.com to comparison shop (they don't pay me to endorse them; I'm just a satisfied customer). You may also find isbn.nu to be a useful comparison-shopping site (hyperlinks in the list above lead to alibris.com searches for those books). I do ask that you make a real effort to use the editions of books ordered through the UCen bookstore for the course (their ISBNs are listed above) in order to facilitate class discussion.

The above is already a pretty substantial reading list. Additional readings (marked SUGGESTED on the schedule below) are optional and available on GauchoSpace; they provide additional background on Yoknapatawpha County, alternate versions of stories that we will read as parts of novels, and other supplementary material that can help to enrich your understanding and appreciation of the construction of Faulkner's fictional world, but which you can also skip without penalty or guilt if you are too busy for additional reading.

Expectations, Warnings, Excoriations

As with so many writers of literary fiction, you will find that the characters and situations represented in Faulkner's writing are not unequivocal representations of positive, life-affirming, politically correct relationships between unambiguously admirable human beings. In fact, many situations represented in Faulkner's writing can be perceived as objectionable on any of a wide variety of grounds. A non-exhaustive list of situations that some students may find problematic in this quarter's course texts might include incest; economic exploitation of poor people; racially motivated violence; bestiality; suicide; sexual assault; discussions of pornography; religious intolerance; failure to comply with various religious or other ethical strictures; non-standard grammar; lynching; castration; less-than-enlightened views on gender, race, sexuality, and other important social issues; and general redneckery.

Despite these facts, we'll be reading a great deal of fantastically beautiful and profoundly moving writing that links together every level of its text, from the smallest phrases to the plot arcs of long novels, into a cohesive, productive, organic whole. Great literature often represents problematic situations, and part of what we're doing this quarter involves looking at the murkier parts of human experience, not just at the clean bits. To put it another way: quite often, Faulkner's writing has more in common with Euripedes than it does with the plots of most Teletubbies episodes.

Remember that the presence of a viewpoint in a text does not, by itself, imply that the author (or the instructor!) endorses that viewpoint. Remember, too, that grading and other aspects of how I treat you do not require that you agree with William Faulkner (or with me). Remember that the course's basic expectation is that you will think deeply, analytically, and honestly, not that you agree with some orthodox position that I have somehow embedded in the course contents.

All of this is to say that the course material is challenging emotionally and politically in addition to being intellectually demanding, and a basic expectation for all students is that they approach the course material and their peers in a fair, open-minded way, giving everything and everyone a fair, considered hearing, and treating everyone else in the class with the respect that is due to all of our colleagues. Students who cannot, or are not willing to, encounter difficult texts, or treat people with differing opinions respectfully, will find that this class is a poor choice for them.

Requirements

In brief, all students are required to:

• read all required texts carefully and thoughtfully;
• attend regularly and participate actively;
• produce reading journal entries, some of which will be circulated to the rest of the class; and
• attentively consider and comment on the journal entries produced by other members of the class.

Students taking the class for four or more units are also expected to prepare a final project (requirements discussed below).

Students who do not complete all of the requirements, or who do not do so in a timely fashion, will find that they receive fewer units at the end of the quarter than they signed up for. If you are having trouble keeping up with the pace of work in the class, please see me so that we can ensure that you receive the number of units you are trying to receive.

Reading Journals

Students are expected to keep a reading journal in which they write regularly throughout the quarter. Each journal entry that you write must be dated and given a title (even if that title is only In-Class Writing Exercise or Some Thoughts on the Em Dash in Absalom, Absalom!), and you should find something in that week's reading to meditate on or think about in writing for that entry. My expectation is that your journal entries will be thoughtful reflections about small-, medium- and large-scale details of the text and your experience of encountering it. Over the course of the quarter, you should pay attention to multiple aspects of Faulkner's texts and your own reactions to them. A nowhere-near-exhaustive list of topics that you might find ways to think about in your journal might include:

• Low-level examinations of how meaning is constructed in a single sentence, or phrase, or paragraph.
• Paragraph-, chapter-, story-, or book-level examinations of how this quarter's narratives are structured.
• Meditations on how Faulkner's short stories are related to novels that later incorporate those same plot events (e.g., you might compare Mule in the Yard with chapter sixteen of The Town, or contrast Afternoon of a Cow with Ike Snopes's pursuit of his beloved in The Hamlet).
• Analytical readings of how Faulkner discloses information progressively to the reader in various circumstances, and what effects this has on how the reader understands and responds to the story.
• Detailed reconstructions of plot events that happen offstage; explorations of character motivations; explanations of the unstated implications of events in the texts we read.
• Thoughtful disagreements with me, with other students, or with scholars publishing on Faulkner.
• Maps of parts of Yoknapatawpha County that you construct from Faulkner's descriptions, or diagrams of temporal sequences or other structural elements, along with notes on how they were created.
• Reflections on how the fictional world of Yoknapatawpha County is constructed by various writing choices that Faulkner makes.
• Explanations of how words and phrases construct multiple layers of meanings, and how this affects you as you read them.
• An explanation of how you unraveled an interpretive difficulty; or of how you got partway to unraveling it and had to stop; or of what prevented you from unraveling it.
• Short creative pieces that engage with or respond to bits of Faulkner's work; short creative pieces in the style and/or spirit of the (now sadly defunct) Faux Faulkner contest.
• Notes on unresolved issues or questions that you want to bring to the attention of the group.
• So. Many. Other. Things. If you're producing a reading (in a very extended sense) of a course text, you're on track. If you have doubts, you can propose ideas to me by email and get feedback.

Note that your journal entries do not need to be fully developed essays, nor do they need to exhaustively examine all aspects of a topic, nor do they need to fully resolve every interpretive issue or difficulty that relates to them, nor do they need to do any outside research (though they may, if you wish, do any or all of these things). You should think deeply about the issues that you discuss, but need not produce perfect work every single time you sit down to write.

Ultimately, the point of this assignment is to get you to pay very close attention to Faulkner's language choices, structures, and methods of meaning-creation; and to get you to pay very close attention to your own processes of reading and interpretation. In order for this process to be effective, you need to write regularly, not simply to produce a massive group of hurried entries at the last possible minute. Set aside time to write in your journal each week, preferably on the same day that you do your reading for this class (though journaling need not follow reading immediately, and you may find it productive to let your thoughts percolate in the back of your head while relaxing, or working on coursework for another class, or working on other tasks, before you sit down to write).

You should always bring your reading journal to class with you, just as you should always bring the current text under consideration to class with you. There will be times that I ask people to read directly from their reading journals, or ask you to engage in brief writing exercises in your journal during class time. In addition to any time we spend writing in class, you are expected to write in your journal out of class at least twice weekly. Each of these entries should be a meaningful engagement with a course text in some way: you should write at least several hundred words each time you sit down to write in your journal (though you may of course write more if you wish).

You may keep your reading journal in any format that you like—in a standard-sized notebook, in a pocket journal, in a word processing document on your laptop's hard drive, on a public-facing blog—provided that you meet the following requirements:

• It is always accessible in class. You will need to both read from and write in journal during class time, so make sure to bring it with you to each class meeting.
• Your journal should be something that you can easily share with others in the class without inconveniently depriving yourself of other information that you need. Keep it in its own notebook, for instance, rather than the one you also use for class notes; or keep it in a separate word processing file that you can easily upload to GauchoSpace or email to someone else in the class.

You will need to turn in your reading journal (briefly) for intra-quarter check-ups at the end of weeks four and seven, and again at the end of week 10. If you are keeping a physical journal, you may instead turn in photocopies of your recent entries instead so that you need not give up your journal for the whole weekend. Alternately, you can write on separate sheets of paper over the weekend and later paste them into your journal. Or you can keep your journal electronically and just email the whole thing to me at the designated checkpoints. Or you can keep your reading journal as a public blog and just email me a link to it when you need to turn in your reading journal for intra-quarter checkups. I encourage you to think carefully about your own writing practices and to do what works well for you. Please see me if you have questions.

Final Projects

Students who are taking the course for four or more units are expected to complete a final project. It is highly recommended that you have an informal conversation with me about your ideas for the final project before you put extensive work into it. Your final project may be any of:

• A standard analytical, literary-critical paper of eight to twelve pages on any course text or theoretical question or issue related to the course's theoretical concerns. (Students who are interested in writing on texts not on the syllabus should consult with me before doing so—I am open to allowing you to do this, but you really should talk to me before you do extensive work. Similarly, if you want to write a longer paper, you are welcome to do so, but I encourage you to talk to me about your ideas early.)
• A short story or longer piece of creative writing that shows you have attentively considered the theoretical and thematic concerns we have discussed during the quarter and are able to engage thoughtfully with them while producing a piece of writing that also engages a reader effectively.
• A creative project of another type in another medium that engages deeply and thoughtfully with the course's concerns.

Regardless of which option you choose for your final project:

• You are strongly encouraged to have an informal discussion about your plans for your final project with me no later than week seven, even if your plans are not yet finalized or firm. If you would like to write on a text not on the syllabus, or if you are taking the open-ended creative project of another type option, you are strongly encouraged to discuss your plans with me no later than week five.
• You should also provide a cover letter (or otherwise accompanying letter) indicating what type of feedback you would like to receive on your final project; I will give you this feedback shortly after summer begins.

Schedule

This reading schedule is subject to change, though it is likely that it will do so only if there is broad consensus that any proposed changes are in everyone's best interest.

Readings marked (GS) are available on GauchoSpace.

• Week 1: 29 and 31 March
  • 29 March: Introduction.
  • 31 March: Sanctuary, ch. 1–13.
• Week 2: 5 and 7 April
  • 5 April: Sanctuary, ch. 14–22; SUGGESTED: The Tall Men (GS) .
  • 7 April: Sanctuary, ch. 23–31; SUGGESTED: The Big Shot (GS) .
• Week 3: 12 and 14 April
  • 12 April: Light in August, ch. 1–7; SUGGESTED: Red Leaves (GS) .
  • 14 April: Light in August, ch. 8–11; SUGGESTED: Uncle Willy (GS) .
• Week 4: 19 and 21 April
  • 19 April: Light in August, ch. 12–16; SUGGESTED: Artist at Home (GS) .
  • 21 April: Light in August, ch. 17–21; SUGGESTED: A Justice (GS) .
  • 21 April: Turn in your reading journal for your first intra-quarter checkup.
• Week 5: 26 and 28 April
  • 26 April: Absalom, Absalom!, ch. 1–4; SUGGESTED: Appendix: The Compsons (GS) .
  • 28 April: Absalom, Absalom!, ch. 5–6; SUGGESTED: Wash (GS).
• Week 6: 3 and 5 May
  • 3 May: Absalom, Absalom!, ch. 7–9; SUGGESTED: Evangeline (GS).
  • 5 May: The Hamlet, part 1; SUGGESTED: Barn Burning (GS) .
• Week 7: 10 and 12 May
  • 10 May: The Hamlet, parts 2 and 3; SUGGESTED: Afternoon of a Cow (GS).
  • 12 May: The Hamlet, part 4; SUGGESTED: Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard (GS).
  • 12 May: Turn in your reading journal for your second intra-quarter checkup.
• Week 8: 17 and 19 May
  • 17 May: The Town, ch. 1–9; SUGGESTED: Centaur in Brass (GS).
  • 19 May: The Town, ch. 10–15; SUGGESTED: Mule in the Yard (GS) .
• Week 9: 26 and 28 May
  • 26 May: The Town, ch. 16–24; SUGGESTED: The Hound (GS).
  • 28 May: Requiem for a Nun, act 1; SUGGESTED: Hog Pawn (GS) .
• Week 10: 31 May and 2 June
  • 31 May: Requiem for a Nun, act 2.
  • 2 June: Requiem for a Nun, act 3.
  • 2 June: Turn in your reading journal for the final time. (If you would like your journal back, please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope with a mailing address for you and sufficient postage for the post office to deliver it.).
• Finals week: 4–10 June
  • Tuesday, 7 June, 11:59 p.m.: Students taking the course for four or more units must submit their final projects via email by this date. (Students completing a project that cannot be submitted by email should discuss alternate arrangements with me before this date.)

Other Resources

A collection of course materials can be found online at http://is.gd/litcs111s16 (or, if you're fond of additional typing, at http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/s16/). At a bare minimum, that site will have electronic copies of all handouts that I distribute during class. There is also a Twitter stream for the course, accessible from the same location, that provides reminders about upcoming events and additional course-related information.

All of Which Is to Say …

I expect that you will put in the necessary work to be prepared for class, that you will engage deeply and substantially with the course material, that you will turn in your work on time, and that you will treat everyone else in class with respect. I want everyone to benefit from and to succeed in this course, and would be happy to hear input from you about how I can help you to do so. If you have questions or concerns, please let me know in my office hours, after class, or by email.

I try very hard to be available to, supportive of, and understanding toward my students. If you are having difficulties with the course material, please come talk to me. If you have unusual, stressful, or bizarre things happen during the term that make it difficult for you to perform up to your potential in the course, please come talk to me. If you just can't seem to get started writing or otherwise working on your final project, please come talk to me. If I can help you to be successful in any reasonable way, please let me know. My job is primarily to support you on your way to academic, intellectual, and artistic success. I am always grateful for input from you about how I can do so.

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