Pod Academy

This podcast is one of two keynotes at the  Rupture, Crisis, Transformation conference on the future of American Studies held at Birkbeck in November 2014 [the other, Caryl Phillips on the Star-spangled banner can be found here] Rejecting ideas of American exceptionalism, Wai Chee Dimock looks at the work of author William Faulkner in a world context, seeing him as a regional writer.  In doing so, she is able to explore how his is the voice of the defeated southern States of America - a thesis she develops with reference to things he said and wrote while in Japan in 1955  (then a recently defeated nation). American novelist William Faulkner was born into an old Southern family in the US. The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) are perhaps his best known works and in 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel". Wai Chee Dimock presents a radically new