In this third of three update lectures, Prof. Bailyn provides new information pertaining to the third part of the course, on cosmology. The basic model of the Universe, including Dark Matter and Dark Energy, is supported by all recent evidence. Work is thus beginning on sorting out the consequences of this model, in particular the growth of structure in the Universe, from tiny modulations of the Cosmic Microwave Background to the current distribution of galaxies.

In this second of three update lectures, Prof. Bailyn discusses new information pertaining to the second part of the course, on black holes. In this lecture Prof. Bailyn describes recent work by he and his colleagues on determining the spin of black holes, which is the only parameter of consequence other than the mass. The results of these investigations are currently ambiguous and controversial.

In this first of three update lectures, Prof. Bailyn discusses new information relevant to the first part of the course, on exoplanets. In particular, Prof. Bailyn reviews the spectacular results from the Kepler mission, launched in 2009, which has discovered thousands of new exoplanets. Examples of these results are discussed, but the long-term goal of discovering Earth-like planets on which life as we know it could thrive has still not quite been achieved.

Professor Wai Chee Dimock concludes her discussion of Light in August and the semester by mapping Faulkner’s theology of Calvinist predestination onto race. Using Nella Larsen’s novel Passing as an intertext, she shows how Joe Christmas’s decision to self-blacken expresses his tragic sense of being predestined, of always “coming second.” Moving away from tragedy, Dimock reads Hightower’s delivery of Lena’s baby as inhabiting a liminal space between tragedy and comedy, as Faulkner gives Hightower a second chance at meaningful communal agency.

Professor Wai Chee Dimock focuses on the unresolved problem of race in Light in August, focusing her discussion on the variety of reflexive and calculated uses of the word “nigger” as a charged term toward Joe Christmas. She shows how the semantic burden of the word varies – used under duress by Joe Brown and the dietician, deliberately made light of by Hightower and Bobbie, fused with the contrary meanings of Calvinist theology by Joanna Burden, and finally ironized by Joe Christmas himself.

Professor Wai Chee Dimock continues her discussion of Light in August by showing how the kindness of strangers turns into malice in the cases of social reformer Joanna Burden and Reverend Hightower. Whereas that malice assumes comedic tones in the depiction of Joanna’s death, it has more complex valences in the case of Reverend Hightower, who is both ethically delicate towards his neighbors and insensitive to his adulterous wife.

Professor Wai Chee Dimock focuses her introductory lecture on Faulkner’s Light in August on the “pagan quality” of his protagonist Lena. She argues that Faulkner uses Lena to update the classic story of the unwed mother by fusing comedy with the epic road novel.

Professor Wai Chee Dimock concludes her discussion of Tender Is the Night with a biographical sketch of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s mental instability, the inspiration for the character of Nicole Diver. Invoking the schema of “have” and “have not,” she then shows how Fitzgerald borrows techniques from film to quicken the pace of Dick Diver’s narrative of dispossession. Dimock argues that Fitzgerald uses close-up, cross-cutting, and the speeding up of negative resolutions to strip Dick of his professional identity and to render him empty-handed at the end.

Professor Wai Chee Dimock positions her reading of Tender Is the Night alongside F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career as a Hollywood screenwriter. She shows how the novel borrows narrative techniques from film, particularly flashback, “switchability” on a macro and micro scale, and montage. Invoking the theories of Sergei Eisenstein, she reads scenes of wartime death and individual murder to show how love and war are cross-mapped, superimposed onto one another as part of the narrative fabric of Tender Is the Night. 

Professor Wai Chee Dimock concludes her discussion of For Whom the Bell Tolls by reading the novel as a narrative of dispossession and repossession. She argues that the rape of Maria, which takes place in front of a barbershop mirror, enacts one type of disempowerment; the end of Robert Jordan’s life represents another, but with the potential for redemption. She shows how Jordan vacillates between a “have” and a “have not,” depending on how ironically one understands Maria’s question “What hast thou?”