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30
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http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/17/395/HM_Faulkner_Watch.jpg
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Pocketwatch
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Pixabay
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pocketwatch
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Graduate Student Residents 2020
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graduate-student-summer-residents-2020
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VGSSR 2020
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Benjamin Brewer, Doctoral Candidate in Philosophy, Emory University
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Around New Year's 2017/18
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Faulkner's _The Sound and the Fury_
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Around New Year’s Eve 2017/18, I was in Brooklyn visiting my sister and brother in law. There was a pretty significant blizzard, and we were completely snowed in, so I picked up the novel I had brought with me on the off chance that I would have time for pleasure reading. The novel was William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which I hadn’t read since high school. Though I hadn’t realized it when I packed it, it was the copy which had belonged to my (paternal) grandfather, who had passed away about a year and a half earlier.
My grandfather was a minister and a professor of philosophy at a tiny liberal arts college in Jefferson City, Tennessee. My grandfather was not a particularly talkative man, and I didn’t share his love of sports, so we mostly bonded over philosophy and literature. And in fact, we didn’t share many favorite figures or problems in philosophy, so we talked most often about literature. He loved modernist novels in general, but he had a special love of William Faulkner, one which he passed on to me.
Faulkner is one of only two prose writers I have encountered whose work is so beautiful that I often have to set it aside for a moment while I’m reading and catch a breath or two (the other being Toni Morrison, who wrote her dissertation on Faulkner). There’s something about the combination of almost unrelenting lyrical beauty (Hortense Spillers once described Absalom, Absalom! as going through a carwash without a car) with merciless plumbing of the unconscious and history of white Southern society that makes Faulkner unsurpassable for me.
Anyway, the second chapter of The Sound and the Fury, which narrates the day leading up to Quentin Compson’s suicide in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has always been one of my favorite pieces of Faulkner’s corpus, and I decided to read it on that freezing day in Brooklyn. The first paragraph is breathtaking in its own right, but as I read it, I noticed my grandfather had underlined, among a few other sparse notations, the word “Grandfather’s” in the following sentence:
"[The watch] was grandfather’s and when father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; its rather extruciating-ly apt you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."
There was something haunting about the way the traces of his reading reached me after his death, not to mention the strange coincidences between my own situation in relation to this object and the text of the passage itself. Usually we have to step back from the texts we study, consider them systematically or theoretically; I enjoy that work, and it has its own pleasures and passions. But sometimes the conditions—history, text, place, etc—happen to align such that that scientific distance becomes unsustainable, or perhaps simply unbearable. The safety of that distance gone, your own specificity feels implicated, struck, perhaps (indeed often) in ways that can feel violent, powerful, unwelcome. In my life these moments haven’t been glorious or extraordinary, but they have been impossible to forget.
Title
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This was your Grandfather's...
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this-was-your-grandfather
Books & Reading
College Teachers
Family
Faulkner, William
Literature
Philosophy
The Sound and the Fury
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http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/8/172/Sappho.jpg
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Sappho
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National Humanities Center Fellows
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Any contributions from current or past fellows at the National Humanities Center
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This collection includes contributions from current or past fellows at the National Humanities Center
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<iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/809871067&color=%2355d7d2&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=false&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=false"></iframe>
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<p>This is Mab Segrest and this is my Humanities Moment. When asked to evoke this moment, I’m taken back to 1965, maybe, in Tuskegee, Alabama, where I’m a student at Macon Academy, a segregated private school that my parents had helped to start a couple years before, when the federal court put out an order in Macon County to integrate Tuskegee High School, where I attended, with three other high schools in cities across the state, and George Wallace sent state troopers on horses to close it down. And my parents helped to shape Macon Academy. And a couple years in, history had come to my front door. I would see the troopers two blocks down, and the media were on my doorstep, and then we would watch ourselves at night on TV, and it had really roiled a lot of reflections for me, as a white girl in a very segregated town, and what the South meant, what this all meant.</p>
<p>So, I went to the little library we had accumulated, that was in Harris Hotel next to the school, next to my house, and I decided I should read William Faulkner, because Faulkner supposedly wrote about the South. So, I picked out this book called <em>The Sound And The Fury</em>, which I had kind of heard of, too, and I started reading it. Now, if you’ve read <em>The Sound And The Fury</em>, you’ll know this. If you’ve not, I need to tell you that it’s done in a series of interior monologues with characters, and the first one is a character Benjy Compson, who is cognitively disabled—in the product of the times, an idiot—and the first hundred pages take place in his head.</p>
<p>Well, I would read the first 60 pages, and I would think, “What in the world is going on here? I’ve never—” And I would start again, and I would start again, and I was more perplexed, just about, than I ever have been with a literary text. And so finally I decided, “You just need to read it more.” And so I got to page 105 and realized, “Oh, wow. It’s Benjy! It’s not me!” This is somebody whose mental—you know, this is an idiot. Which is a derogatory term, but that’s what was I given to think of in the day. And I learned that sometimes you just need to keep reading. And certainly with my culture, I needed to do that, too.</p>
<p>I had a kind of equivalent moment later, 20 years later, when I came to Duke to graduate school. I came out as a lesbian. Well, I came to graduate school, and I had a lesbian relationship, but I wasn’t out as a lesbian, and I was really needing to understand it, in some way or another, so I didn’t go to the Gothic Bookshop at Duke, because people might see me. I went to the Intimate Bookstore in Chapel Hill. I got a book called <em>Sappho Was a Right-On Woman</em>, and I read through it, and there’s a list of three questions that you should ask yourself, and I only remember one. “What causes heterosexuality?” And that question was a revelation to me. Like, “Oh, it’s not what causes <em>homo</em>sexuality. It’s what causes <em>hetero</em>sexuality.”</p>
<p>I can ask the questions, and how you ask the questions makes a really big difference, so both of those are kind of bookends to how texts, arguments, people struggling with what it means to be human in particular cultural contexts, can be liberating and revelatory to either an adolescent in Alabama struggling with the apartheid system or later on, a woman who is a lesbian struggling with this intensely homophobic culture. And the larger literatures that have come out of African American scholars and women scholars, and queer scholars, on these questions of race/gender, have revolutionized, really, our understanding of the human, of what humanities are, and where we are positioned within them. So my humanities moment, then, is my encounter as a girl in Tuskegee with <em>The Sound and The Fury</em>.</p>
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Sometimes You Just Need to Keep Reading
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<p>Growing up in the mid-1960s as a white girl in Tuskegee, Alabama, Mab Segrest attended a segregated private school that her parents had helped found in response to a court order years earlier to integrate public high schools. In the shadows of governor George Wallace’s racist violence, history had “come to [her] front door.” Seeking a better understanding of the U.S. South, she found William Faulkner’s <em>The Sound and the Fury</em> in the local library. Perplexed by the interior monologue of its opening pages, she forged ahead in grappling with the famed Southern writer’s dizzying language. Around page 105, a revelation rewarded her persistence: she had been reading from the point of view of cognitively impaired Benjy, the “idiot.”</p>
<p>Years later, while a graduate student in Duke’s English department, a time during which she eventually came out as a lesbian, she explored the contents of the Intimate Bookshop in the next town over, Chapel Hill. A question in a book called <em>Sappho Was a Right-On Woman</em> transformed her worldview: “What causes heterosexuality?” By shifting the query from <em>homo</em>sexuality to <em>hetero</em>sexuality, the question was a “revelation” for Segrest.</p>
<p>By continuing to dwell on Faulkner’s novel, Segrest learned the value of perseverance: “Sometimes you just need to keep reading.” In grappling with the queries of a feminist text (“what causes heterosexuality?”), she realized that “how you ask the questions makes a really big difference.” Texts, arguments, and how people struggle with what it means to be human can be “liberatory or revelatory,” whether for a young girl in the midst of an apartheid system or for a lesbian woman in a homophobic society. Together, these humanities moments bookend Segrest’s personal and intellectual formation and her understanding of the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender.</p>
Date
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mid-1960s
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<a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/meet-the-fellows/mab-segrest/">Mab Segrest</a>, Professor Emerita, Connecticut College
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segrest-sometimes-you-just-need-to-keep-reading
Abbott, Sidney
Books & Reading
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina
Faulkner, William
Feminism
Literature
Love, Barbara
Professors
Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism
Segregation
The Sound and the Fury
Tuskegee, Alabama
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http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/169/kennedys.jpeg
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Jackie O. and John F. Kennedy engagement photo by Richard Avedon
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/B3voqrDJaDg" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
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Discovering How Literature and Art Place Demands on Us
Description
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<p>From reading <em>Crime and Punishment</em> as a high school senior and the Depression-era masterpieces <em>Absalom, Absolom!</em> and <em>Let Us Now Praise Famous Men</em> in college, Gil Greggs describes a personal journey of discovery about the ways literature connects readers to the real world.</p>
<p>Later, he describes how the portraits painted by Rembrandt and photographs taken by Richard Avedon help us notice and better appreciate the humanity of the people around us and to perceive hints of their inner lives.</p>
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Dr. Gil Greggs, Director of Academic Programs, St. David’s School, Raleigh NC
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gil-greggs-learning-to-read-in-order-to-see
Absalom, Absalom!
Agee, James
Avedon, Richard
Books & Reading
Crime and Punishment
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Evans, Walker
Faulkner, William
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Literature
Paintings
Photography
Rembrant, Harmenszoon van Rijn
Teachers & Teaching