Religious Themes in William Faulkner

3 credits · Divinity School

As a major literary figure who inherited the thunderous legacies of the Civil War, William Faulkner grappled with the tensions of modernism, racism, war, and the sense of alienation, displacement, and despair that increasingly challenged humankind in the twentieth century, tensions with which we, as people of faith, continue to struggle. His contemporary, Robert Penn Warren, remarked of Faulkner, "He has taken our world, with its powerful sense of history, its tangled loyalties, its pains and tensions of transitions, its pieties and violences, and elevated it to the level of a great moral drama on the tragic scale." Participants in this course will read "The Sound and the Fury", "Absalom, Absalom", "Sanctuary", "Requiem for a Nun", and "Light in August" and examine the literary works for their religious themes and questions. [3] Mr. Judge