Digging into Faulkner

Hi folks! I'm looking forward to seeing you tonight for our film screening, and to catching up in class tomorrow on your progress through Sanctuary. In the meantime, please peruse these questions and use them to help focus your reading, if it's helpful. As always, though, I'm more interested in talking about what YOU find interesting--so use these as jumping off points, nothing more.

Questions to consider for Sanctuary:

--What’s up with the title? How do you make sense of it?

--The prose can be a little disorienting at times—often, Faulkner will re-tell certain incidents from various perspectives (or even the same character’s eyes at different times), or else only give clarifying information toward the end of a chapter (or several chapters later). How does this affect your reading of the text? What kinds of themes does such style bring out, and how can you make sense of this in terms of the overall message/argument you get from the text?

--Race, sex, and class are clear locations of violence and confrontation in the text. What messages do these offensive, brutal, and/or graphic depictions convey to you as a reader? What about the text’s humor? Where is it funny, and why? What other locations of violence do you see in this text?

--The back of your book (if you have the Vintage version) indicates that Faulkner draws from Eliot in this text. How do you see him doing so? To what ends?

--What kinds of confrontations do you see going on BETWEEN women, BETWEEN men, BETWEEN similarly raced/classed folks, etc? What do you make of these confrontations with “others”/”sames”? And can Girard help us here?