The scope of what we are talking about when we are talking about changes in policing. Instead of focusing primarily on reform, there are conversations about defunding or shrieking or abolishing the police, fundamentally changing the institution of the police and what they do. Data is really being proffered in many ways as this sort of panacea or Silver Bullet with many of these issues. In the defunding debate, lets say we are going to defund the cut costs. People say data can be used to allocate resources more efficiently. Or lets reduce racial bias and officer decisionmaking. Lets automate it. Or you want to reduce the categorical suspicion of young black males and more accurately predict crime, try predictive algorithms. I think we need to be cautious , when we using data are trying to solve social problems with technological solutions. The first thing i would suggest in moving forward is that we pause,moment to stop, to and really invert the order of operations of what has been going on in the last 10 or so years. I think we need to stop the pattern of Law Enforcement rolling out new technology in ort any Community Buy evaluation of its efficacy. A lot of these federally funded initiatives or for evidencebased policing. They occur before we have evidence of their efficacy. To a secondme recommendation, which is we should broaden the scope of the metrics of success, we need to redefine successful policing. As came up in that meeting, theres been a preoccupation with primates crime rates and that makes sense. Theres a whole host of other issues we need to Pay Attention to when we think about data. Is there increase of cases cleared by arrest, and decrease of stops without arrest . Raciale or decrease in disparity in stops without arrest or false arrests . Legitimacythe issues, racial equality issues that lie at the heart of policing today and historically always have. I would also suggest there is something going on when we are talking about transforming policing, where if the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In the policing context, we are using data to direct largely punitive interventions. I think if we are able to say within the United States, the police are being called to respond to many things that they do not need to be present for, and might be better addressed by professionals or Community Members trained in a different way. Towe are able to use data direct not just punitive resources but nonpunitive resources, we might be able to reduce some inequalities that are playing out. 2002 there is a movie in that Steven Spielberg directed called minority report, and it turns five citations in your book. I wanted to show people the trailer for that and we have about less than 10 minutes left. To sum this all up about the Inflection Point society is at. [video clip] was coming . Double homicide, killer is male, white, mid 40s. I am placing you under arrest for the future murder of sarah marx. The future can be seen. All we have to run on are the images they produce. There is nothing wrong with the system, it is perfect. Murder can be stopped. Do we get any false positive . We are arresting individuals that have broken no law. But they will. The government cant be wrong. How far from reality is that 2002 Science Fiction movie . Sarah we are kind of far from that. The reason it comes up so much in the book is not really because im trying to analogize predictive policing to minority report, but because it is the Public Perception of what is going on is. Whenever i give a talk, people are like, this is minority report. People are not being arrested for precrimes. However, i think what is happening is data is being used to create categories and scores of suspiciousness of people. Law enforcement treats folks differently depending on how suspicious they are or arent, how suspicious a particular area is, how at risk to crime an area is paired one of the most consequential Law Enforcement positions is where to go to look for crime. We are clearly using predictive policing to predict certain types of crime, street crime. We are not using predictive policing to predict financial crime. The hotspots are not in new york on wall street, for example. These are very social decisions about which crimes we want to prioritize, and it tends to be street crime as opposed to whitecollar crime. Fromnk we are kind of far it in some ways, but a lot of times what i would do in my interviews is i would ask my interviewee to imagine or fantasize where they would be in five or 10 years and terms of police use of data and technology. That is really where a lot of the minority report stuff came up. They would say things like i can imagine if i was driving down the street, going to serve somebody an arrest warrant and the windshield of my vehicle would be like google glass, i see there is a registered firearm in this house, there is a sex offender in the house, someone with an outstanding warrant. They would be bombarded with information. This is the minority report world. While it has not really played out yet, i do think these public imaginarys can be powerful, particular in moments like right now, where we are trying to reimagine and reinvent policing. Susan as we close out, i would like to raise some objectives people listening to you might be saying. For example, crime rates are down, technology is obviously making me safer. How would you respond to that . Sarah i think the causal relationship between enforcement practices and crime rates is very heavily contested. There is a whole bunch of things responsible for crime rates, and we can look to the 1990s and early 2000s as one of the emblematic cases of this. Policing is on a many things that impacts crime rates. It is way too simplistic a story to say the introduction of these new technologies causally impacts crime rates going down. It could be a host of other things from Economic Conditions to changes in the drug trade. Susan another objection could be i am a lawabiding citizen, why should i be concerned about Data Collection . Sarah absolutely, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear logic. One of the responses i would say to that is first of all, again, it relies on the assumption of the infallible state, so you have to be fully confident that all police officers, all lawyers, all state actors are never going to make a mistake or unfair decisions about you because you will not be able to push back on any of it because you will not know why these things occurred because it is all shrouded in opaque algorithms. Many of the magazines pages in the 1880s were devoted to battles and leaders of the civil war. Instead of first person memoirs, how to survive commanders on either side. That claim to look at the conflict on a strictly Military Point of view. To vandalize neither the wars causes or is consequent is. Consequences. Him, thaten like soldiers sense of shared suffering would override all sectional or ideological differences. A sacrifice and its memorialization on the ground which they would ultimately reunite. Ts that sense of a common loss. That emerged only after the end of reconstruction. It was not in the spirit in which it was built. In a dedicatory carving on the wall, it tells us the building marks the patriotism of those who served in the army and navy of the United States during the war for the preservation of the union. It was built for the union dead, the nations loyal citizens, and for them only. Harvards confederate dead were given no place at that memorial space. It is a place of triumph, and frank about it. A few decades after the war was over, when this Reconciliation Movement was underway, Frederick Douglass found that he needed to remind people that there had been a right side to the civil war and a wrong side. For him, hadn, gone too far. The memorial does not forget such things. It insists that neither the confederacy nor its soldiers e any claim on the still. Whenever i read the bostonians, i am stirred by basils openhearted notion. And when i step inside memorial hall, i remember that during the Academic Year of 1909 to 1910, an equally fictional mississippian would have had to enter that Building Three times a day prof. Gorra there are other doors to the dining hall, he would not always have to walk past that line of dead union names. Seemaybe sometimes he did some southerner who had died in the north, what would he have made of him . The sender the fury began as a short story about children whose parents had set them outside to play, hoping to keep the kids from realizing that their grandmother has just died. The child is curious, shes is a girl called candace and the kids had been splashing in a creek, she had gotten muddy and wet, now she climbed the tree next to the house, she looks in the upstairs window, she is curious, she wants to know what is going on. Her brothers stare up at her from below. That moment will fix them forever. Catty remains adventurous, a desire that expands to the family. Her older brother stays in place, and then jason, who threatens to tell on her. Benji, hest child, was not able to speak. He is the idiot in the lines of someone faulkners takes his title. We first see her through his eyes. Benji cannot this team was between past and present, his first person narration slips from moment to moment back in his normal prison of 1928 and into childhood. Each period encased within betweenand the movement triggered by association or repetition, he combines the events to which we first approaches Family History. Her promiscuity, her pregnancy by one man and marriage to another. Alcoholism, fatal quentins suicide in the ruins of family life that follow. Faulkner had later said that he tried to tell all of this through benji alone, it did not work until he started over this time in sectioning quentins voice set in 1910 on the last day of his life. Try again, fail again. Tomoved the narration back 1928, he gave it over to the vicious jason. It still was not enough, he said. And so he said, i will let faulkner try with a concluding section written in the third person. Each of the three firstperson sections, each of those depends not on the narrators present, but rather on the past they cant escape and in each case, that past is defined in terms of the siblings whose voice we hear. Presence toabsent whom the brothers cannot ever accommodate themselves and one of them wont ever get over. As a culturalzed historian has written, it is precisely to be possessed by an image or event. Master,ience one cannot the unwitting reenactment of an event one simply cannot decouple. Trauma, trauma lies in our delayed response to a violence that our minds cannot encompass. Memory, aitten repetition that forces us to relive our past. Dude reiteration. Those who suffer from it have no choice but to circle around the unexpired their own experience. Approaching the psychic space where they least want to be and yet must. Drawn by fascination and horror. Faulkner tells the constant story four times hoping that each will be his last. They always return to her memory, sniffing at it, unable to let it alone. Two benji, she was comfort, to ,ason, she contains the future but for my purposes, quentin is the one who matters here. On the last day of his life, most of what happens to quentin was happening in memory. He knows what he will do that night and he buys two flat irons to wait his way into the river, he sits next to a black man on the streetcar and is amazed at how easy he finds him. What is really determinative is the life that lies behind you. The life and memory, the past in ttych you could not stop ca from being who she is. What matters is its failure, so the day slips gears and he stands by the creek where they had played as children. She lies in the water, her skirt soaked against her, she climbs out. But she sits with her face , the smell of honeysuckle. Him, push, she tells harder, i want you to. He asks her to touch it. To put out her hand and got his way. Her hand on the knife that he holds that her throat. And she is willing, she says, willing to die as she says she did when the other men touched her. Have you ever done that . She asks and he asks her how many men and she only says too many. Neurologists have identified a disorder in which a memory for theitself unbidden totality of sensory decay. Those afflicted with a can see their own tasks after as if it were a film, a continuous shell, reruns of unforgettable reruns. Such memories seem more real than ones at the very present did quentin conversation with her and her father were continued threat today. Big moments on why she seems to lose his presence, he steps fully into his past. Fails with a knife, he goes looking for a man. He is not her first lover, but he is the man who has gotten her ,regnant and when they meet quentin orders him to leave town. I say he must go, not my father, not anybody, i say it. If you dont, i will kill you. The man is both unused and concerned, he tells quentin not to take it so hard. The man to hit him, does have to stop him. Only then does quentin realize that he is holding a wet and bloodstained greg rag. His face goes cold. He is not in mississippi at all, but rather in massachusetts still. And without realizing it, he has picked and lost a fight with another harvard student, and another man who has been talking too casually about women. It is quite new has gone into a fugue in which the present seems to bend, the fight triggered by the memory, the memory by the fight. In the present has vanished for us as well. We read in this part of the novel, we read for a dozen pages. Syntax,lkners broken the unpunctuated lowercase lines of dialogue spilling down the page, that is the only thing here to remind us that we are really inside quentins mind. The day remembers itself for him. He snaps too, he snaps back into the present. His roommate tells and he is going to have a shiner. Conversationcal with his father replace in his mind, a conversation about his own inability to accept the fact virgin. Is no longer a your anguish his father says, your anguish grows out of a temporary state. That is what virginity is, both hers and yours. It is something to move on from, something we are meant to lose. So is pain itself. But the boy will have none of it. And i, temporary, and he, you cannot bear to think that someday you will no longer hurt you like this. Temporary, and he was the saddest road of all, there is nothing else in the world, it is not despair until time, it is not even time until it was. Was. Something that was lies in the past. It is fixed and unchanging, concluded and therefore temporary indeed. He is in contrast ongoing and on permit, he is an ever present Family History that defines him. Would bething worse the belief that he might someday get over it, that it would not be temporary. , to discardurvival that trauma, to believe he might outlive it, that dismisses the very that constitutes itself. Quentin would rather die than imagine that someday will no longer come and he recognizes that. Is the pass past that one cannot it is the past that one cannot bend. The full memory of this talk returns him only at the very end of the evening, the very end of the chapter that faulkner devotes to, and returns to him just a little while before he kills himself. That conversation has been at the edge of his mind all day. That morning he stood along the stiffs and with a envelope with his suicide note in his coat. For a second he imagines himself in the future as if hes going to live, but then his fathers word comes back to him. Spoken in mississippi the summer before, was. That is where he soon will be, was, past tense. Hear that time laden syllable floats on the page without explanation. Quentin has already had that conversation with his father, we have not. Not yet, we have not read it yet. That lies 50 pages on, so we cannot know what that word means to him. Thisext thought in narrative is rather cryptic, than was. Der again, saddest of all. Again. We will not understand that claim until it becomes literally true. Until that exchange with his father runs through his head once more, we hear those words again. Again. Mber catty sadder than was, saddest of all. Excuse me, i need a little liquid. Do withall this have to the war . All this excursion giving given to these characters . Thats a question i want to explore now. Historians have augured that faulkners subject is the brief and unfulfilled desire to which is characters are forever subject. There is a deep contrary between the movements of faulkners mind with the scent of an inescapable and thebut trauma history and culture of his region, so deep that it is impossible to distinguish between them. The reverend hightower will write in august of 1930, he believes his life had ceased before it began. That it is a single instance of darkness in which a horse galloped and a gun crashed and his confederate grandfather fell in the dust. We will take a later novel, intruder in the dust from 1948, that book tells us there is a place in the mind of every southern white boy when it is still not yet 2 00 on the third day of gettysburg. The charge against the union has not begun. That is what quentin wants, a pastor that is still not yet past that is still not yet. A moment in which it all still is. A moment before the past becomes irrevocable and in which he can stay forever. Someday all this will no longer occur to mr. Combs and that is precisely what he cannot accept. He cannot accept the idea of outliving his own pain. Quentin lives in an afterlife and what he has to tell us about the south is that it all happens over and over again. The same troubles and events, the same corals, the same men corals. He same the same men and generations repeating themselves. There are many ways to understand this, but for me it lies in pushing the sense of trauma beyond the bounds of the individual psyche as indeed freud suggested. Past int people recall common, so they may share the same wounds. Suggests the names unrepresented, the events, the event itself as opposed to his memory. To look up tos and then away from the moment of climax, he almost never presents it duller directly. Catty forctually see example, we know only her remembered presence, only her present in the narratives her brothers tell. Only the pain of her loss. And so it is with the civil war yet in it is felt and faulkners work it is nowhere fully presented. They hear the past as it cries out for quentin and perhaps for his creator, too. A trauma induced by the pain they have never not known, their voices marked by the compulsions to repeat. Part of the pleasure principle that endures even in pleasures absence. Again. Question, the sound and the fury ends with a scene on the town square. Of a confederate soldier gazed with ntis beneath his marble hand in wind and weather. Have his hand up to his eyes that because in the novel faulkner used two statues in his hometown fused two statues into one. This one in the square and the one on the campus of the university of mississippi where the soldier does indeed hold his hand over his eyes to shade them. Monuments, monuments remind us that we must always remember. Memorials that we should never forget. What does such a statue ask us to remember . What does that memory required to forget . In faulkners day, the white south filled its public spaces with mementos to its own cause. They mastered the rhetoric of victimhood and indeed, its people were victims, victims of what they had done to themselves. They were also perpetrators. Their insistence on their own sense of loss effectively denied the greater trauma with which the land was stained, the trauma as 250ncoln described years of bloody and unrequited toil. It belongs to most of white america, the country in which the blue and the gray have thought of themselves and become one. And meanwhile, the marble man stands century in the courthouse are, and solid tramp triumph. The books last page makes that literally true, on that page, the teenage servant tries to take the carriage to the statues left rather than to the accustommed write and get a beating in consequence. Nevertheless, the pastor will speak despite that statue. Here i am going to make a jump in both time and space. One night i was walking with my family down a residential street in the german city in a german city, a city i knew well but as i looked ahead of me i saw something new on the sidewalk before me, i saw a brass plate i got way ahead of myself i am sorry. My powerpoint jumped and i have to get it back. It will come back in a second, im so sorry for that. Hang on. I got it, sorry about that, my mouse has lost power. Street ining down the the german city and i saw white new metallic being in the streetlight, when i looked, we saw a breastplate the size and shape the cobblestone had replaced. It was engraved with a name and some dates. In front of the next house we saw another and then another down the block. All the surnames were jewish, but the birthdays had varied, everyone listed on those stones 1943, atin 1942 or places whose names we knew too well. They marked the last address at which the person they named had lived freely. Each of them remember is a particular person at a particular place. Not an abstract mass of victims. There are now many thousands of these stones throughout germany and indeed the whole of europe. Local groups, schoolchildren, sometimes the current household people like that do the Necessary Research to find out who had once lived at a given the artist whon conceived of the project makes the stone by hand with the brass attached to the concrete cube. Germany has many memorials to the holocaust, they are often quite cerebral. Installations for which the visitors usually need some explanation, a bit of text to tell them what he is seeing. Avoid the legibility of a statue. You need to work at what they say, puzzle over them. Of meaningimpasse rather than moving directly for a Representational Image for some unexpected emotion, some expected moment of sorrow or loss. You have to think before you get there. That its of this is burden see to it, you can tell what those stones already merely about. If you bend to look, you are looking at yourself. You look, you pause, you think. That glow forces you to stop short, without looking for. You,rces itself upon atrocity happens here. These are the best examples i germans call a long awful work, a word made by putting a couple of words together, it is the process of working through the past. It is what one does, must do with their difficult history. It is a struggle that may last for generations, it extends even to those individuals who carry no personal share of the burden. That work, that work is unfinished and indeed unfinished able. E unfinish nevertheless, the process itself has become a central part of modern Germanys National identity. And for many nongermans, the seriousness of that engagement stands as a model to emulate. Fully to generation contend in the American South, it took a century. Of course, it is found the anachronistic to amend the inability of the confederacys immediate survivors to overcome their past. To note their failure to engage in anything like it, i say it is anachronistic because the very concept depends upon a psychoanalytical language that did not then exist. What did exist was a religious vocabulary that might have gotten them to the same place. A vocabulary of justice and atonement. Southern churches of not long before had made their peace this way. Many germans felt sorry for themselves. They werem insisted perfectly within their rights, and that is with the richmond journalists journalist did in his 1866 book called the lost cause. There is regionally been an essay on this book in the New York Times book review called a lost cause 1866. Secession might have proved a fractal impossibility, but the bowed to whatly robert e lee called the north superior numbers and resources. The soldiers had lost, their principles they thought, remained under vanquished. Unvanquished. No analogy is perfect, never before have i seen a memorial like that in germany of the second world war. I noticed in a recent book called learning from the germans which pursues the analogy i am making now. Ofcarved or cast figure hitlers himself looms above a has donety as lee above virginias capital. Of course the statues of richmonds monument avenue were not meant to honor their novel subjects. Reminder of who was once more in charge. Now of course, that is changing. It is very subtle as we have all seen in the news. Decided to remove the confederate memorials, stonewall jackson, jefferson davis. An injunction against the removal has been thrown out, the may now beceeds done. The enormous statue of robert e lee remains because the state owns that and the work is not yet done, but many of us have seen pictures of the changes made to it this summer and know that the circle around it has become a space where africanamerican dance troops have been performing. Souths own work and confronting is past and is that eventually took public firm in selma and birmingham, at a greensboro , it happens now in montgomerys new National Memorial for peace and justice which tries to record every mention it is happening in faulkners hometown of oxford where the university of mississippi has a series of contextualizing plaques laced next to the sites associated with the confederacy encodings plaques the document the labor of slaves. Tot school has also decided remove its own confederate memorial, the statue memorializing an army unit that was raised on the campus. The place where everyone it has been moved from a place where everyone must see it to a cemetery. I think some of this work had to happen in print before it could happen in public. And may fiction ran just a little bit ahead of its time because faulkners own books, they are in themselves and perhaps the sound of fear he stands as the greatest of them, the greatest of the texts. The greatest because the most entrapped in it, the book most marked by a sense of its own failure. Mastering the past, that is they have not been him to do. No matter how much he struggles and fights, you cannot do it because the past he still lives in the moment of loss. It simply goes on happening. And yet the novelist account of that very impossibility, that stands to itself as an instance of that never finished process. I will move toward a conclusion and change my focus again and doing so. 1962 a poet talked about the civil war. What heh embraced called the great alibi in which it referenced and justifies every failing. To excuseaziness, them all. That relief allowed to evade his reckoning with what we can call the offense of american slavery. It stands is one reason why we have not done the work. The yankees haircut a corresponding the yankees had a corresponding myth. Northerners believed themselves redeemed by it. I forgot howht say many yankee fortunes depended on slavery owned cotton. Ofy underlined this sect its own righteousness. Whenever i stand inside the memorial hall. Smugeel just a little bit as though i were drawing on that treasure. My side was right. But the building was to persuade us was right in the place seems to have an offshoot effect of him doing so. That makes me recall for my own reflexes. It makes me think for a moment that maybe this century magazines belief and reconciliation, maybe that was not such a bad thing. Theyhat emphasis to which spoke, the emphasis on reunion, sense of shared suffering. An emotional appeal like the one i described, of reconciliation. That is no substitute for a historical political judgment. In richmond we can indeed still drive down memorial avenue and drive around the grand equestrian sculpture of lee 60 feet high. Different stone base to the top of his head. Jefferson davis stirred further down the road. A tall man standing before a column. That usually marks victory. There have been moments in our past where this meaning of the civil war has seemed silent. This now and 2020 is not one of them. And remembering that the thought seemed to be at the heart of our national life. The summer has made it alive again. I do think memorial halls is finally ended late a legitimate exercise of public memory. His active committee ration is just and right. His active commemorations just and right because it focuses on the International Name of the dads. E dos notderate statute have that. It spoke to the tyranny of virginias majority opinion. And never served a morally developed persons and his presence was a great wrong. It was a monument that was always intended as an insult. To a large portion of virginias citizens. The fury does not say anything about memorial hall. But it does provide a curious relevance of the war in the form of a minor character called deacon. He met every trainee the start of school for the last 40 years. He runs errands, lives on tips. Sometimes he appears dressed like uncle tom. And talking like uncle remus. In others he wears a Brooks Brothers suit, and switches coa ts and speaks is one gentleman to another. The details of his biography are never clear. Quentin does not even know where he comes from. 40 years tickets back to 1870 when the memory of the fighting was new. Is deacon a southerner . Was he born a slave . He likes parades and ceremonies. Stepping out for Decoration Day armed with the uniform. Dar was a Fraternal Organization whose members had served in the union forces. They were integrated. And during reconstruction it fought for black voting rights. Es were deacons cloth other peoples castoffs. I would like to think he might once have been a soldier. And though neither that uniforms source, a man with deacon sense of occasion would if you were real. 1897 for the unfailing of the bronze relief in honor of the 54th massachusetts. There it is, thats the particular relief im talking about. This is new englands most during work of civil war memory. It sits at the top of beacon hill. Across the street from the statehouse. Many things make it powerful. Among it is a perfect fusion between the artist skill and the Ethical Imperatives of his subject. Nothing here is abstract. Shoes, the seam of a trousers leg, the stripes on a soldiers arm, the roles creased by the straps that hold them on each soldiers tack. No other work of civil war statuary can match the perfection of this in its detail. Not a gettysburg or shiloh, not in any city square in the north or south. But that alone is not the source of its power. God chose these individual men and they are individuals. It shows these men at the start of the journey that would lead to their defeat near charleston. His work implies a story. It has the narrative of a great history painting. That force reminds us why the civil war is necessary. In the work was intended as a aw himself rather than to his regimen. His figure is the first we see. The faces of the soldiers are modeled with equal care. Making the individual moment into a collective mind. The statue actually captures the parade, the ceremonial parade regiment made through boston right before the embarked. And during that. Parade shaw positioned himself outside his men alongside of them. Time has renamed the work in our minds. And made the individual work into a collective one. Boston thinkple in of it as the shaw memorial. His dedication was a great ceremony. With speeches by the governor and the mayor. Though not by any of the surviving soldiers. Booker t. Washington was asked to talk instead. And the harvard philosopher william james. , lokire importantly james, the 54th adjutant who died in 1880 three, never recovering from the war and its wounds. Already james notes that this memorial is not for shaw alone. Sainte care with which gardens was depicted in a group thatdinary soldiers sure makes it exceptional. Xcept, of course, they were not ordinary soldiers. They were the first black regimen recruited in the north. Itself. Iment of the war a reminder that their american all colors and conditions. That is why he says massachusetts, why massachusetts has honored the regimen that lost its fight. In describing both a monument and the troops on march he seems to echo the battle hymn of the republican. Saint gardens work as a selfless version of that great him. He gives us the terrible swift sword, let us die to make men free. And that is the resolution sculpture placed they did not make this war, but they have accepted it. Retreat will not call here thank you. We have a time for a few audience questions but we want to start with one of my own. Dr. Gorra im sorry without my mouse i cannot get rid of this screen share. I think i can do that. Dr. Gorra thank you. Thank you so much. No problem. So there are a lot of moments in that stood out to me. The first game 35 words in to be exact when you called faulkner the most important novelists of the 20th century. Ot our the most important the most important. I wonder if you can make your case over hemingway, steinbeck and lee. Dr. Gorra sure. Hemingway, thevin comparable case perhaps would be hemingway. Although we have yet to see how mellow and tonif morrisons plays out over the decades. Hemingways sentence by sentence. That hemingway is an innovator on the level of sentences. He is not an end form of the novel. He tells chronological narratives. They do not do much in the way of formal innovation. That is the only one of faulkner s novels that had that influence. With faulkner there is a huge shelf of works. There is a huge shelf. And that it influence has gone to many ways. So the American Literature of the American South and the decades and generations that follow has been about faulkner. Everyone is following him or running away from him as fast as they can. The flattery oconnor line that somebody asked, would you like s shadow,n faulkner when the dixie wind is coming down the tracks you get out of the way. You do not want to get caught doing the same thing he does because there is an attraction to the train. Been africanAmerican Literature too. Morrison herself to his great presence. , theynow younger writers might be fighting him but they are engaging with him. Also thenk also, innovations of faulkner lays with time and memory, with point if you, have been influential for writers outside that cell. This year ambition of his sentences, his willingness to try new things and every novel. Oure is also the fact that sense of the past is an inescapable thing. He gives voice to this more than i think any other american novelist 19th or 20th century. Might be the possible exception. That has become part of the way we are learning to think about our american past. Beyond that, i know this answer hasoing on, faulkners headed an influence abroad. French fiction, a lot of french onting from the 1930s heavily influenced by faulkner. Beyond that, my books got one review abroad, some spanish this book has not been translated, but in the newspaper el pais. A spanish writer rather faulkner has been crucial for spanish and latin american writers. Gabriel Garcia Marquez took one of his inspirations from 100 years of solitude from faulkner. He thought that faulkner showed how you can write about what looks like a cultural backwater. An isolated place, caught off from great cities, and make great literature out of that. Garcia marquez thought of that as an inspiration for what he wanted to do writing about ombia. I will stop there. Thank you for that one. An audience question here. A good one, given that we are weak and a half out from the books week. How would you respond to a request to not include faulkner in a College Level western civilization course. Wooden instructor be justified removing them from a syllabus . Answerve a complicated to that question because i think in a westernciv course, you have an enormous range of material. You can deal with. I am not certain that there is 20th century novelist to has to be on that list. Have some example of international modernism. To be on that list. Whether it is faulkner, whether it is virginia woolf, whether artist, portrait of the you needed 20th century modernist. I am not saying you need faulkner. If it is an American Literature course absolutely you do need faulkner. That, in some instances people might want to move from this is because he can be controversial. N wordcters use the all the time. He writes about racially fraught topics. I do not like the word trigger warnings, but i do give my students in my faulkner class, i a content advisor. We are going to have that word , murder ise rape assessed, bestie elegy, violent death. We are going to have every crime imaginable. I just want you to know that. The way a movie review will say why this movie got an r rating. In ank youve got to be American Literature class that does not say you have to admire everything that is on that page. I myself think that literature when ismost alive not is presented as something to bow down before but something to wrestle with, to engage with. Sometimes to admire and argue with. To fight with. Thats when literature for me is most alive, when you what,gaged which is say, writers and the africanamerican tradition have been doing with faulkner. What southern writers like Flannery Oconnor will do. There is an agonistic relationship. They fought him. I would like to encourage that in my students. Another audience question. Do you have a sense of how people in the south felt about the way faulkner wrote about the south . Where there any instances they revealed something they were not aware of. Absolutely. This is a story in the book. Lawyer, did not think much when he was young. ,e said, even after you did not well out into the 1930s, i do not think very much of billys books. I do not read them much. I guess he makes money off them. Writing dirty books for yankees. Regarded by a was lot of he is writing dirty books for yankees. To the degree that the Publishing Industry was in new york, they were being published there. She wrote books that did spill secrets. Sometimes he exaggerated things. Some College Libraries in the south in the 1930s did not want to have his books. This is the kind of, this is the thing that often happens to writers from groups that are perceived as marginalizing. The peculiar thing is is that faulkner rights as a member of a dominant class, white southerners, that is nevertheless marginalized within u. S. Culture as a whole. It he gets accused of saying things we should keep in the family, as it were. Writerssomething that from other marginalized groups went into all the brought into all the time. Our young men was told, you should not say those things. About our people in front of christian people. Ralph ellison got the same kind of complaints. Dont show us in that light. Of ais is sort of, sort frequent thing. But yes, faulkner got a lot of cases. As time went on, younger writers began to realize there was something pretty special going on in oxford. And began to write critical essays about him. But it took a while for that kind of, any kind of wide acceptance to come. I am not even certain the nobel was appreciated fully in his hometown. They like the fact that eventually he would bring the tourists there based on one of his books. That brought business. But they had reservations about the work. That is a great question. Thank you. More here. Is there most particular character that represents faulkner, not so much in terms of a biography but in terms of a belief system . Dr. Gorra i want to say yes and no. In some ofcharacter his later books, in intruder in the dust. Some other books, a country, the meeting lawyer. The leading lawyer in jefferson. A man named gavin stevens. Who will often explain things. Explain the meaning of southern history, he will explain the relations between different parts of the county. That is probably as close as sitcoms, except that faulkner also presents him ironically, windbaglly is kind of a in places. Characterhere is no who really like the faulkner persona. It is not like if you read hemingways a farewell to arms and we know that hemingway and creating frederick henry, the narrator, has drawn very much on his own experience and will one in his own love affairs his own experience in world war i. Going beyond frederick henry. There is a lot of the author in him. Somebody moore who has a lot of different voices and characters, people inside him. And he wants to let them out. Lot,ld say stevens talks a much more than faulkner ever did in person. Faulkner talked only on the page. But there are moments when he seems a little close to the author. And then moments would faulkner started to wash his hands of him and makes us see he is a little bit of a fool. Has faulkner taken any criticism for the sound of the fury, for the depiction of benji, i differently able character and member of that community . Is that criticism warranted . Dr. Gorra right. That is a good question. Course, a new strain in faulkner criticism. To sort of tended much of the critical history of the novel of people just tended to read benji as what the idiot. N is as in they might say that he has down syndrome. Disability studies in critical literature is a growth area. I have seen more recent readings that suggest that benji is in some ways autistic. However, one wants to define that. There criticism is more directed at other critics. Than therecritics narrow version of benji. Not so much at faulkner himself. This may change. This is an area where there is a lot of critical literature being written about benji from the disability studies point of view. But the criticism is more directed at earlier critical conditions that faulkner himself. I will say here that he did have a natural person in mind when he created benji. An actual person in mind when he created benji. It was a young man who lived in town and a large white house with a history to the house. A wrought iron fence around its yard. If you visit oxford, people will take you around that is the model for the thompson house. Is faulkners first teacher. He would run along the fence looking at people. , this board, he was young man was often teased by others. And faulkner himself was very upset by the way people would tease and bother him. And even after writing the sound and the fury, he would often take his daughter jill and go for walks and they would visit edward chandler. Is a biographical story i love. Thats great. I am going to close here. I mentioned before we got started that one of my favorite byks is our declaration daniel allen to cheap part is the declaration of independence line by line, word by world. And parses every possible meeting based on the context to a change in comma placement. Go quite that far but there are examples of your book of how do we interpret this particular line, in particular the old man follows the example use where he is asked what they are fighting for . Ed if i everdamn did know. You asked the question. Is that he never knew or is that he thought he knew and now he realizes he never did know . But i wonder is there a line in particular that stands out to you that has been misinterpreted by readers over the years . Yeah, well, this question has tested my memory of how much i can remember, particularly faulkner lines. I have i remembered details of plotting character. I have never been able to memorize a poem. So i am going to cheat. And i am going to say the shortest chapter where the character is eight years old, his mother has just died. Caughtultaneously he is a big, big fish down the creek. And somehow the two events get confused in his mind and he says, this is the entirety of the chapter. Fish. Ther is a some early readers took that indicationn as an that bartel man himself was an i crazy, that heas was unstable in some way. No. His mother just died. Later in the novel he becomes an entire reliable witness. He has a reliable witness. This my mother is a fish. My students will be laughing because of this entire chapter. But it is what faulkner does to things that these two have become associated in his mind in this moment of trauma and gotten themselves confused with each other. But early readers, who would not yet gotten a handle on what faulkner was doing, they often excellent, thank you so much for joining us. Good luck with the rest of your virtual book tour. I hope my mouse comes back. Ok, bye bye. Youre watching history tv all weekend every weekend on cspan three. Each week, American History tvs american artifacts visits museums and historic places. Up next, a visit to the National Building museum to learn about the exhibit architecture of an asylum, st. Elizabeths, 1852 to 2017. Known as the Government Hospital for the insane when it opened in 1852, it was built with a view of washington, d. C. At its peak in 1960, st. Elizabeths had almost 8,000