February 29, March 7, 14, 21, 28, 2012
Dinner 5:30 (Reservations required), $5.00 adults, $3.00 children
Program 6:30 - 7:30

Religious Questions in William Falkner's The Sound and the Fury 
Led by Victor Judge

William Faulkner’s fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury, represents the author’s first, true masterpiece, and perhaps his finest work. The novel was Faulkner’s favorite creation and described by him as his “most splendid failure” in which he depicts in four movements, presented from the perspectives of four narrators, the decline of the once-aristocratic Compson family. One may argue that The Sound and the Fury continues in modified form the tradition of the nineteenth-century fiction; the novel tells the story of a family over a period of thirty years, following a generation from early childhood through the primary remembered events of their lives to maturity or death. As readers, we enter into the lives of the Compson family from the early 1890s and follow their lives through Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday of 1928. We shall examine Faulkner’s treatment of religious themes in the novel and discuss how the book illustrates the author’s interpretation of his role as writer: to present “the old, universal verities and truths of the heart and the problems of the spirit.”

Victor Judge serves as the assistant dean for academic affairs at Vanderbilt University Divinity School where he is also lecturer in literature and religion. His courses include: The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor; A Dialogue Among Three Christian Poets: John Donne, Emily Dickinson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.; The Canon of Albert Camus: The Secular Saint of Resistance; William Faulkner and Religion; and Creative Writing and Religion. He is a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Incarnation where he teaches in the adult formation program and in the Breaking Open of the Word ministry for catechumens.