Date: 2^nd December, 2019

Time: 10:00 – 11:30 a.m.

Venue: Room 201, The East 5 Building, Zijingang Campus, Zhejiang University.

【Speaker Introduction】：Zhang Aiping, graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages of Fudan University, and completed her master and doctor degree of English and American literature from Harvard University. Prof. Zhang served as a judge of the American Culture Foundation and an expert editor of a number of British and American publishing houses and periodicals.

【Lecture Abstract】：Both Faulkner and Morrison have secured their worldwide reputation with a series of ethically complex novels, in which marginalized characters struggle desperately to cope with their psychic dislocations and fulfill their intuitive desires through seemingly unethical, and even unthinkable, actions. In these novels, what has baffled the reader most is the absence of a clear narrational or authorial intent to affirm any ethical values or deliver any ethical judgments. To invite readers, as Marshall Gregory suggests, “into specific ways of feeling, thinking, and judging” while wading through the ethical complexities in these novels, both authors rely on innovative narrative scheme, strategic ambiguities, and metaphorical implications only to offer some sporadic and limited guidance to our ethical contemplation without revealing their own opinion. 

        Morrison once stated, “What is exciting about American literature is that business of how writers say things under, beneath, and around their stories. … Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! spends the entire book tracing race and you can’t find it. … hard it is to withhold that kind of information but hinting, pointing all of the time? So the structure is the argument.” By examining and comparing Faulkner’s Light in August and Morrison’s Beloved, this lecture attempts to show how, through various textual ambiguities and multiple narrative perspectives on individuals caught in unexpected ethical dilemmas, both authors provoke and enlighten readers to discover and respond to the ethical implications, intentions, and effects of the two novels.