Professor Wai Chee Dimock focuses on the themes of dying and not dying that reappear throughout For Whom the Bell Tolls. Marshaling Elaine Scarry’s argument on the aesthetics of killing, she reads the execution of the Fascists as a representation of both aesthetic and ethical “ugliness” in death. She then turns to a discussion of the tragic-comic dimensions of not dying as depicted in the bullfighter Finito’s refusal to die and the smell of death emanating from the old women in the Madrid marketplace.

Professor Wai Chee Dimock continues her discussion of For Whom the Bell Tolls by analyzing the contrast Robert Jordan draws between “distant homes” and the on-site environment of the Spanish Civil War. She juxtaposes his invocations of Paris and Missouri to the rooted communities of the guerillas, and reads analogies of racial and ethnic conflict--specifically, the references to the Moors in Spain and persecuted blacks in America--as a point of tension, an ironic commentary on the coexistence of the distant home and the on-site environment.

Professor Wai Chee Dimock begins her discussion of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls with an overview of the Spanish Civil War, the historical event at the heart of the novel. She introduces the notion of an “involuntary foreigner” to discuss the fate of Hemingway’s American protagonist Robert Jordan, as well as the Spanish guerillas who are turned into “aliens” within their own country due to their print and technological illiteracies.

Professor Wai Chee Dimock concludes her discussion of As I Lay Dying with an analysis of its generic form. Using Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter to anchor her discussion of the American literary tradition, she argues that As I Lay Dying continually negotiates the comic and the tragic genres as we shift from one perspective to another: one character’s comic gain is often another’s tragic loss.

Professor Wai Chee Dimock traces Faulkner’s appropriation of the epic genre through two conventions: the blurring of boundaries between humans and non-humans and the resurrection of the dead. She first reads Faulkner’s minor character Tull and his relation to both mules and buzzards to draw out the “nature of manhood in poor whites.” From Tull, she shifts focus to Jewel and suggests that his kinship with the snake and the horse foregrounds the narrative secrecy of Jewel’s genealogy.

Professor Wai Chee Dimock begins her discussion of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying by orienting the novel to the Great Depression in the South, as focalized through such famous texts as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Once this macro history is established, she reads the narrative techniques of As I Lay Dying through two analytic lenses. First, she draws on Bakhtin’s notion of social dialects to underscore the language that indexes poor whites as a Southern type.

Professor Wai Chee Dimock demonstrates how four of Fitzgerald’s most famous short stories--“The Rich Boy,” “Babylon Revisited,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” and “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”--represent “social types,” generic identities that Fitzgerald explores as forms of social reality.  She reads the dramatic tension in each of those stories as determined by the protagaonist’s conformity to or deviation from their idealized social type. 

Professor Wai Chee Dimock concludes her discussion of To Have and Have Not by showing how, in the context of the Cuban Revolutions and the Great Depression, characters devolve into those who “Have” and those who “Have Not.” While protagonist Harry Morgan may look like a political and economic “Have Not”--he neither supports the revolution nor possesses enough money to extract himself from its seedier operations--his ability to bring happiness to his wife Marie makes him a social “Have” in a more profound sense.

In the first part of this lecture, Professor Freedman discusses the emergence of the  Vikings from Scandinavia in the ninth and tenth centuries.  The Vikings were highly adaptive, raiding (the Carolingian Empire), trading (Byzantium and the Caliphate) or settling (Greenland and Iceland) depending on local conditions. Through their wide-ranging travels, the Vikings created networks bringing into contact parts of the world that were previously either not connected or minimally so.

In this lecture, Professor Freedman discusses the crisis and decline of Charlemagne’s empire.  Increasingly faced with external threats -- particularly the Viking invasions – the Carolingian Empire ultimately collapsed from internal causes, because its rulers were unable  effectively to manage such a large empire. In the absence of strong social infrastructure and an idea of loyalty to the ruler, government servants strove to make their positions hereditary and nobles sought to set up independent kingdoms.