Professor Autumn Womack

a moment or an object that then unleashes this entire unconscious life of a character or an object.

So that's the way I've been thinking about her relationship to Wolf.

And that might be my own reading more so than what she would say.

But I do kind of see those formal resonances.

For Faulkner, which she talked about more and she taught him in her class, that became the basis for Playing in the Dark.

For Faulkner, I think her interest in him, and she says this, she was really interested in, and I would say admired, and I think that might be the word that she uses, the way that he was returning to a subject, in his case, like race and the Civil War, that people didn't want to talk about, and insisting that we think about it and also think about it in new terms and new forms.

And in one lecture for her class,

At Princeton, she says something about the way that he just wouldn't look away and he wouldn't let the reader look away either.

I mean, the blue aside, we are trapped in that text.

Like it is, it's almost suffocating.

And so I think her interest in these writers is,

Even if she's not always agreeing with their politics, right?

And often she's not.

She's interested in their writerly concerns and form.

Like writers read everything and they learn from everything.

So that's how I've been thinking about her relationship to those kind of writers.

Thank you for having me.