Blog Post 3 - Rittenburg

Because my classmates Cassandra, Nial, and Kevin articulated their thoughts so well on the Dalton reading, I thought I could avoid recapitulation and write instead on the article that I enjoyed the most; the New York Times article, "Faulkner Link to Plantation Diary Discovered" by Patricia Cohen.

The main source of enjoyment I found throughout the article was a sense that I was reading the work of a peer. The kind of investigative work done through an examination of two disparate texts to discern a sort of general creative intent is interesting. The work done here concerning the deconstruction of Faulkner's themes and set-pieces as related to the diary is very similar to the kind of work that I am doing for my English 5014 Class.

The article resonated with me by establishing a sense of the importance of the work done in both finding and preserving historical documents such as these. The work done in preserving, examining, and extrapolating from the diaries is admirable in any sense, but when it can be applied to an author such as Faulkner to derive a new understanding of his work, you can see how valuable it really is.