DR. ANCA PEIU, ASSOC. PROF.
ELECTIVE I: WILLIAM FAULKNER AND THE SOUTH
SYLLABUS, COURSE DESCRIPTION & BIBLIOGRAPHY
This special set of lectures aims at introducing undergraduate students to some of the
most representative novels of William Faulkner, whose “keystone to the Universe” is the County
of Yoknapatawpha.
Therefore, a narratological “portrait of the artist” is outlined, in which – apparently and,
of course, ironically – the dominant trace is given rather by the verb TO HAVE than by the verb
TO BE. Students are invited to find out the “real” object of this necessarily imaginative
possession.
We shall particularly take into consideration such Faulknerian classics as:
THE SOUND AND THE FURY ; SARTORIS (1929);
AS I LAY DYING (1930);
LIGHT IN AUGUST (1932);
ABSALOM, ABSALOM! (1936).
Theoretical & critical support will be found in the works of:
Paul Ricoeur (TIME AND NARRATIVE, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984);
Mikhail Bakhtin, (PROBLEMS OF DOSTOEVSKY’S POETICS, in the Romanian version,
published at “Univers” Publishing House in 1970);
Wayne Booth (THE RHETORIC OF FICTION, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983);
Anca Peiu (TRECUTUL TIMPULUI PERFECT:de la Th.Mann la W.Faulkner, EUB2001)
The main course requirements are just two: thorough reading & full attendance. The final
examination will be written, applying some theoretical viewpoints to some aspects of one (or
more) of the above mentioned novels.
Week 1: A brief introduction to W. Faulkner’s personality, life & literary career; support: biographies by Joseph Blotner and Stephen B. Oates; cassette.
Week 2: A general introduction to the main works of literary theory & criticism used here.
Week 3: Ricoeurian TIME – EMPLOTMENT tension in THE SOUND AND THE FURY
Week 4: Bakhtinian POLYPHONY in AS I LAY DYING
Week 5: Between TO BE (or TIME) & TO HAVE (or NARRATIVE): ABSALOM,
ABSALOM!
Week 6: (Mock)”Objectivity in Fiction”(see Wayne C. Booth): LIGHT IN AUGUST
Week 7: Natives & Non-Natives @ Yoknapatawpha. co: Faulknerian typology
Week 8: (neither) Misogyny (n)or Gynolatry in Faulkner: Caddy Compson, Addie Bundren,
Judith Sutpen, Rosa Coldfield, Eulalia Bon, Joanna Burden.
Week 9: Family group-pictures in an “oratory of solitude”: the Compsons, the Coldfields, the
Sutpen(s), the Bundrens; narratological issues: polyphonic novel, polyglossia, narrative
voices: “oratory of solitude” vs. “silent listening”; dialogic/ monologic; laughter and the
carnivalesque
Week 7: The Faustian dimension in Father – Son / Mother-Daughter relationships:
Thomas Sutpen & Son(s) / Addie Bundren & Daughter
Week 8: Versions of Otherness / Double Identities: Joe Christmas, Caddy Compson, Judith
Sutpen; hybrid protagonists for (more than) “twice told tales”; “the Story That Would
Not Tell” : “failed” protagonists, “failed” narrators
Week 9: A 1945-Appendix to a 1929-story. Maps. Chronologies. Genealogies. Faulkner’s
doomed degesis (“my apocrypha”)
Week 10: Intertextuality in W. Faulkner: a matter of “tradition & dream” (see Walter Allen).
THE SCARLET LETTER, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN told
twice as AS I LAY DYING and ABSALOM, ABSALOM!
Week 11: The Hybrid Triangle: Caddy/Quentin-Benjy-Jason, Addie-Anse-Whitfield, Lena
Grove-Byron Bunch-Lucas Burch, Judith Sutpen- Henry Sutpen- Charles Bon
Week 12: W. Faulkner – “the last novelist” (see Hugh Kenner) or a novelist in the European
sense of the word (see André Bleikasten)?
Week 13: W. Faulkner and 20th Century Romanian novel writing: L. Rebreanu, M. Preda
Week 14: Students’ Choice(s)
ELECTIVE II: “AFTER THE FINAL NO”:THE WORLD OF WALLACE
STEVENS
SYLLABUS, COURSE DESCRIPTION & BIBLIOGRAPHY
This optional course in 20th Century American Poetry provides an introduction and an
encouraging approach to a somewhat discouraging part of modern literary heritage. Hence, full
(& also active) attendance of the classes is required – all the more since, in our country,
Stevensian verse is only available in anthologies, which means that the professor in charge must
supply students with copies of more than 30 poems, two essays, and a play by the author in
question. I can only hope that – demanding though it may seem – this elective course finally
rewards its audience. It is with this hope on my mind that I wrote the book bearing the very title
of this course. It is meant as a readers’ guide to what is actually undertaken during the classes.
Students will have to write essays. The final test is also written.
The sources of my Stevensian texts are two volumes:
STEVENS, WALLACE, COLLECTED POETRY & PROSE, Library of America, Literary
Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, 1997;
STEVENS, WALLACE, PALM AT THE END OF THE MIND, THE, SELECTED POEMS
& A PLAY, Edited by Holly Stevens, Vintage Books, Random House, 1971.
The best part of the theoretical & critical bibliography here employed comes from:
BLOOM, HAROLD, WALLACE STEVENS: THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATE, Cornell
Univ. Press, 1980;
JARRELL, RANDALL, POETRY AND THE AGE, Noonday Press, New York, 1972;
KERMODE, FRANK, WALLACE STEVENS, Faber & Faber, London, 1989;
LENSING, GEORGE S., WALLACE STEVENS AND THE SEASONS, Louisiana State U.
Press, Baton Rouge, 2001;
PEIU, ANCA, “AFTER THE FINAL NO”:THE WORLD OF WALLACE STEVENS,
EUB, 2001;
RICOEUR, PAUL, RULE OF METAPHOR, THE, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
SYLLABUS OPTIONAL COURSE
ON WALLACE STEVENS
Week 1: An Introduction to the Poet’s Life & Career(s). Wallace Stevens and Modernism.
Week 2: Stevens’s Vision on “The Irrational Element in Poetry” and H. Bloom’s Theory of
the ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE
Week 3: Wallace Stevens’s “Two or Three Ideas”: notions of ORDER & FINAL BELIEF
Week 4: Symptoms of Stevensian Imagism: Playful Experiment and Gaudy Verse in: “13
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, “Metaphors of a Magnifico”, “The Pleasures of
Merely Circulating”,”Six Significant Landscapes”
Week 5: Stevensian Metaphor between Reality and “the Capable Imagination”: “Mrs. Alfred
Uruguay”, “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”
Week 6: Music in Wallace Stevens: “The Idea of Order at Key West”, “Mozart 1935”, “Sad
Strains of a Gay Waltz”, “Anglais Mort a Florence”
Week 7: Stevensian WINTRY MOOD: “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”, “Depression before
Spring”, “Dance of the Macabre Mice”, “The Snow Man”
Week 8: Dramatic Personae in Wallace Stevens: (I) MAN in “The Man on the Dump”,
“Connoisseur of Chaos”, “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard”, “The Man Whose
Pharynx Was Bad”, ”Man Carrying Thing”
Week 9: (II) WOMAN-PERSONA in: “Sunday Morning”, “ Blanche McCarthy”, “The World
as Meditation”,”A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”
Week 10: (III) LION-PERSONA in: “Poetry Is a Destructive Force”, “Lions in Sweden”,
“The Glass of Water”
Week 11: Metaphor of FINAL BELIEF in: “Asides on the Oboe”, “Of Modern Poetry”,
“Montrachet-le-Jardin”
Week 12: “Bowl, Cat and Broomstick”: Reflections on a Tragicomic Self-Portrait
Week 13: The Stevensian Longer Poem as Crisis-Poem (see Harold Bloom, George S.
Lensing on the subject); e.g. “The Comedian as the Letter C” or “Description without
Place”, or “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”, or “Esthétique du Mal”
Week 14: “Bottom’s Dream”: “The the” of a WS. Shakespeare in Wallace Stevens. “Pages
of illustration”: (not only) “Peter Quince at the Clavier”