To accommodate changing schedules and reader preferences, I have re-configured the dates for both Between the Acts and The Sound and the Fury. There is an afternoon schedule for Between the Acts starting mid-March and a one meeting Salon Intensive March 15th on offer for The Sound and the Fury. Please register today (using the event page) so that the study can be confirmed and you can receive the opening notes and start reading.
LONDON One meeting Intensive four-hour Salon Friday March 15th 6:30-10:30 PM cost is 45£.
In William Faulkner’s first truly modernist work, he pushes to break through the confines of time and sequence to get at the essence of human nature- as Malcolm Bradbury explains, “Faulkner’s preoccupation with time has to do with the endless interlocking of personal and public histories and with the relation of the past to the lost, chaotic present.” The Sound and the Fury uses the interior world of its narrators to expose a crumbling world, through inference and allusion rather than through direct social critique. In the Modernist method, Faulkner employs stream of consciousness, symbolism as a connecting fiber and several interior realities (that show how one can see the world as absolutely in one’s way, and directly in contrast to others) that must compete for authority.
This Salon will draw upon individual’s questions and ideas to shed light on this complex text. The book is richer upon re-reading, enabling the first time reader access to Faulkner’s complex vision through the insights of others. Upon a first reading, the narratives appear jumbled and opaque but as the pieces start to fit together, one can see the complex and careful planning that Faulkner has used- and to what end? This is what we must grapple with for the Salon.
BETWEEN THE ACTS
Thursday afternoons 12-2 PM starting March 14th
Salon Details
The Between the Acts Salon will run for four weeks starting mid-March. Please email me with concerns or schedule queries. The study is a dynamic weave of participant questions and responses, readings of significant passages and consideration of the themes and genres that the book illuminates.
Virginia Woolf’s lyric prose and gorgeous vision combine to consider the sense of exhaustion that punctuated the Modernist period leading up to WW II. Edward Mendelson describes the book: “Everything comes to an end in Between the Acts, and then, as the book itself comes to an end, something unknowable begins.” The book includes a pageant composed of imaginary episodes from 1000 years of English history, and a close examination of the intricacies of village life in England in the days leading up to WW II. As always, it is Woolf’s penetrating consideration of intimate relationships and the places where language fails—but something else transcends—that lift this work from “the doom of sudden death hanging over us” as one of her characters describes.
Recommended Edition: Oxford World Classics (Introduction and notes by Frank Kermode)
