In Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the reader gets to meet Addie on page 169, many days after her passing. What is the significance of her brief narrative so far into the book? Why is Addie ‘revived’ post mortem at a time when her family seems to be breaking apart? What did we learn about the nature of her character from this short passage? Did her point of view reveal any new information about the Bundren’s family dynamic?
The Modernist Novel
ENGL 387, Professor Allred, Spring 2021
Great questions. You will find a wealth of material on Addie to work from: the challenge will be to narrow it. Do you want to pursue the philosophical register of her chapter (the tricky relationship between words and things)? Addie’s very eccentric relationship to “proper” white femininity in the interwar South? The more narrative question of how her chapter relates to broader questions of temporality and modernist narrative? You’ll figure this out as you go. I recommend looking through some volumes of the U of MS Press’s FAULKNER AND YOKNAPATAWPHA series (in ProQuest ebooks via Hunter’s library): there will be many article-length pieces on AILD to look through in that series.