Dr. Robert Rudnicki, an associate professor and coordinator of graduate studies in English, has published an essay on William Faulkner’s “A Fable” and Cormac McCarthy’s “Suttree” and “Blood Meridian” in the spring issue of the Faulkner Journal, a scholarly journal dedicated to the study of Faulkner’s life, work and literary influence. Rudnicki’s essay was timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy and reflects upon how historical ruins, even modern ones such as the destruction of the World Trade Towers, are both mourned as well as forecast by a variety of American writers. In “Turtles All the Way Down: Foundation, Edifice and Ruin in Faulkner and McCarthy,” Rudnicki uses diverse writings from William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Don DeLillo to demonstrate that much of American literature is preoccupied with denouncing humankind’s seemingly endless cycle of violence, intolerance and self-destruction, which Faulkner called man’s “deathless folly.”