Yale professor Wai Chee Dimock lectures on William Faulkner's Light in August as part of her course Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner. She centers the talk on Lena Grove's pagan quality, arguing that Faulkner reworks the old story of the unwed mother by fusing comedy with the epic road novel and updating the Greek tradition of hospitality to strangers. Dimock traces this through specific stylistic devices: the switchability between Lena and the supporting cast, Faulkner's use of gerunds as a linguistic refuge for Lena, and the allegorical naming of characters like Byron and Burden as social types with predetermined trajectories. The lecture moves chapter by chapter through these formal techniques, showing how they carry the novel's argument about fate, comedy, and kindness. Recorded at Yale in Fall 2011 as part of the Open Yale Courses series.