Wai Chee Dimock, teaching Yale's Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner course (AMST 246), continues her reading of Light in August, tracing how the kindness of strangers curdles into malice. She examines Joanna Burden's death, staged with oddly comedic tones, alongside Reverend Hightower, a man ethically delicate toward his neighbors yet cruel to his adulterous wife. Dimock frames these through Southern hospitality, Christian neighbor-ethics, and lingering resentment toward Northern abolitionists. She then turns to Lena Grove and Joe Christmas, arguing that their narratives form dramatic and undramatic counterparts within the novel, both marked by a grammar of passivity built around the gerund form that renders them receptacles for other characters' actions. The lecture runs through nine chapters, from Hightower's ethical challenge to the kinship between Grove and Christmas, closing Yale's Fall 2011 unit on Faulkner.