Reading Groups

What the South Knew: Faulkner in the Trump Era with Linda Chavers

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4 Sessions Saturdays, 11:00 am EDT - 12:30 pm EDT July 11 to August 22, 2026

Online via Zoom

The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at a 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
7/11, 7/25, 8/8, 8/22
Online via Zoom

In Light in August (1932), a man named Joe Christmas moves through a Mississippi town in a body no one can classify. Is he white? Is he Black? And what happens to a community unable to answer that question? In Absalom, Absalom! (1936), two young men sit in a cold Harvard dorm room, trying to reconstruct a story about a man named Thomas Sutpen. Sutpen arrived in Mississippi with nothing, built a dynasty on land stolen from Indigenous people with labor stolen from enslaved people, and then watched it collapse under the weight of a son whose blood contradicted everything Sutpen spent his life defending.

The central crisis of both novels is not the South’s defeat, but what happens when the mythology of white American identity is exposed as fiction. Told in fragmented and recursive prose, these novels enact crisis and refuse resolution—because Faulkner understood that clarity, in such narratives, can itself be a kind of lie.

This reading group is not a political seminar but a literary reckoning. Faulkner’s South is a template: we will read him closely—his sentences, his structure, and his radical formal choices—as a way of understanding what Trump’s America is, and has always been. We will ask what Faulkner saw, and what the difficulty of his prose reveals about the price of seeing America clearly.

Reading List: Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!

Session I: Light in August, parts 1-3
Session II: Light in August, parts 4-5, and selected excerpts from Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
Session III: Absalom, Absalom!, chapters 1-5
Session IV: Absalom, Absalom!, chapters 6-9, and selected contemporary readings on the MAGA imaginary

What to expect from this reading group: Faulkner’s work rewards scrutiny, so I’ll open each session highlighting a passage—a sentence, a scene, a structural choice—and then open the floor to discussion. Participants will be asked what they noticed, not just what they thought.

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Please read chapters 1–5 of Light in August before the first session.

Upcoming Programming: Continue your exploration of Faulkner with Carl Rollyson’s single-session reading group on Faulkner’s short story, “Mistral,” starting July 16.

We offer a limited number of need-based scholarships for our Reading Groups and Writing Workshops, covering 50% of tuition. Applicants selected for scholarships will be notified one week prior to the first meeting. To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form.

Pricing inclusive of sales tax if applicable. Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

Led by

Linda Chavers

Linda Chavers

Linda Chavers holds a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies from Harvard University, where her dissertation, Violent Disruptions: William Faulkner and Richard Wright’s Racial Imaginations, argued that Faulkner and Wright function as mirror images of each other and that the interracial body as spectacle organizes the American cultural imagination in ways that are ongoing, structural, and lethal. She is a writer whose essays and fiction have appeared in Elle, Dame Magazine, the Offing, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her novel This Is Violence is represented by Lucy Cleland at Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

About this series

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