Wai Chee Dimock, professor at Yale, lectures on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying as part of her course Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner. She opens by connecting the novel's Depression-era Southern setting to documentary texts like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, then applies two critical frameworks: Bakhtin's theory of social dialects, used to show how the poor white characters' speech marks them as a distinct Southern type, and Frank Kermode's concept of narrative secrecy, used to trace how the novel withholds and gradually reveals Dewey Dell's illegitimate pregnancy and Jewel's illegitimate birth. Dimock moves through the novel's multiple narrators, including Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman, examining how each one's voice carries both a class dialect and a stake in concealing or exposing the family's secrets. Recorded at Yale in Fall 2011 as part of the Open Yale Courses series, the lecture is organized into clear chapters covering chronology, dialect, and the mechanics of narrative disclosure.