Fall 2016 Course: Faulkner and Morrison: Race, Memory, and Aesthetics with Professor Schreiber

 Faulkner and Morrison: 

Race, Memory, and Aesthetics

ENGL 3820W (CRN 15624)
Professor Evelyn Schreiber
Tuesday/Thursday 12:45-2:00 PM


This exciting Fall 2016 course will comprehensively examine the works of two renowned and integral American authors, William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, linking their fictional and discursive practices and analyzing how their works and ideologies reflect on each other and intersect. This course requires only two papers, the second of which will be rewritten for a better grade, and no final exam!



We will specifically examine how the texts of both authors reenact and resist racism and patriarchal structures; how they explore the ways in which memory and the past construct identity; and how they experiment with style.  This course will consider the ways in which the texts illuminate a continuum in American literature through discussions of socially constructed identity and issues of race, class, and gender. In addition, the class will utilize cultural studies and psychoanalytic critical approaches.


Professor Schreiber is one of the leading Morrison scholars in the country, and is President of the Toni Morrison Society (TMS) and a member of the TMS Bench by the Road Committee. She organizes and presents at yearly panels for TMS at American Literature Association Conference. She is also a leading scholar in the emerging field of trauma studies, and serves as the Co-Chair for New Directions Program, the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis, Inc.



She is the author of two outstanding books:
 

Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison is an interdisciplinary study of trauma in Morrison’s fiction and was awarded the Toni Morrison Society Book Prize for best single-authored book on Morrison’s work, 2010-2012. It was nominated for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize for an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture.



Subversive Voices: Eroticizing the Other in William Faulkner and Toni Morrison examines subjectivity and race via the theory of Jacques Lacan and Cultural Studies. This book received the Toni Morrison Society Book Prize for best book on Morrison, 2000-2003; it also was nominated for the MLA prize for best first book, 2003.

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