AACI • ASOCIACIÓN ARGENTINA DE CULTURA INGLESA

Contemporary Literature Workshop
Lecturer: Daniel Ferreyra

Despite their obvious differences in time and background, Faulkner and Roy share common literary concerns: the inevitable passage of time, human finitude, the fight of the individual in society, and the burden of the past. William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 in recognition for such ground-breaking novels as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom! Arundhati Roy was awarded the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things in 1997.

As I Lay Dying is one of the greatest works of world literature and a key text in Modernism.
The novel centers on the lives of the members of the Bundren family as they carry the
corpse of the clan matriarch to Jefferson, Mississippi, for burial. Along the way, Faulkner
explores their intricate family relationships in a series of interior monologues that reveal
their rivalries, their resentment, their hopes, their human nature.

The God of Small Things is Roy’s first and only novel. Set in Kerala, southern India, it also
deals with the history of a family, the Ipes, as they struggle to make sense of the world in
Post-Independence India. In particular, Roy explores the plight of Indian women who try to
find self-definition by breaking free from the constraints of caste and family in a highly
patriarchal society.

The aim of this workshop is to discuss these two works of literature and analyse some
aspects of literary theory (narrative voice, focalization, intertextuality, paratext, etc) in order
to gain further insight into the novels.


Two contemporary novels:

. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner.
. The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy.


* From April 13 to July 6.
* Fridays, from 11 am to 1 pm.