Faulkner's Subject

Faulkner's Subject
Author: Philip M. Weinstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1992-05-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521390477

Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns offers a reading of William Faulkner by viewing his masterpieces through the lens of current critical theory. The book addresses both the power of his work and the current theoretical issues that call that power into question.

Creating Faulkner's Reputation

Creating Faulkner's Reputation
Author: Lawrence H. Schwartz
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1988
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780870496455

A systematic approach to using currently available techniques of artificial intelligence to develop computer programs for commercial use. From basic concepts of knowledge engineering through managing a complete system. Schwartz (English, Montclair State College-NJ) asks: How was it possible for a writer, out-of-print and generally ignored in the early 1940s, to be proclaimed a literary genius in 1950? His research illuminates the process by which Faulkner was chosen to be revivified as an important American nationalist writer during the heating up of the Cold War. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture

Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture
Author: Charles Hannon
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2012-01-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0807143685

Throughout his career, William Faulkner produced a literary discourse remarkably contiguous with other discourses of American culture, but seldom has his work been explored as a participant in the shifts and ruptures that characterize modern discursive systems. Charles Hannon argues in his brilliant new study that the language of Faulkner's fiction is replete with the voiced conflicts that shaped America and the South from the 1920s to1950. Specifically, Hannon takes five contemporary debates -- in historiography, law, labor, ethnography, and film -- and relates them both to canonical and less-discussed texts of Faulkner. Hannon employs a theoretical middle ground between Michael Bakhtin's stylistics of the novel and Michel Foucault's model of discourse as an autonomous self-regulated domain, while also drawing from the vast critical literature on Faulkner's fiction. He begins by linking the story cycle The Unvanquished to the battle over interpretations of American history as voiced by the Nashville Agrarians on the one hand and W. E. B. DuBois on the other. Next Hannon shows how Faulkner's detective fiction of the early 1930s and portions of his novel The Hamlet were affected by the emerging schism between adherents of a new school of legal realism and those bound to a more conservative formalist jurisprudence. According to Hannon, Faulkner's great novel Absalom, Absalom! reflects in its depiction of various forms of labor one of Franklin Roosevelt's major New Deal accomplishments -- the Wagner Act of 1935 -- as well as contract disputes in the agricultural and manufacturing South and in the film studios of Hollywood. Hannon discusses Faulkner's experimentation in The Hamlet vis-á-vis the development of the ethnographic method in the field of anthropology. He concludes with a fascinating analysis of the filming of Intruder in the Dust in Faulkner's hometown of Oxford, Mississippi. Through Hannon's keen interpretive readings, Faulkner's texts emerge as a complex "node" in the larger discursive conflicts of his time. Though he often seemed to be detached from influence, Faulkner was, Hannon reveals, intensely attentive to ideas at the fore.

A Companion to Faulkner Studies

A Companion to Faulkner Studies
Author: Charles Peek
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2004-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0313059659

Faulkner scholarship is one of the largest critical enterprises currently at work. Because of its size and scope, accessing that scholarship has become difficult for scholars, students, and general readers alike. This reference includes chapters on individual approaches to Faulkner studies, including archetypal, historical, biographical, feminist, and psychological criticism, among others. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and surveys the contributions of that approach to Faulkner scholarship. The volume concludes with a selected, general bibliography and glossary of critical terms. William Faulkner is one of the most widely read and studied American writers. His works have also generated a vast body of scholarship and elicited criticism from a wide range of approaches. Because of its size, scope, and diversity, accessing that scholarship has become difficult for scholars, students, and general readers alike. This reference comprehensively overviews the present state of Faulkner studies. The volume includes chapters written by expert contributors. Each chapter defines a particular critical approach and surveys the contributions of that approach to Faulkner studies. Some of the approaches covered are archetypal, biographical, feminist, historical, and psychological, among others. The book closes with a selected, general bibliography and glossary of critical terms.

Faulkner's Artistic Vision

Faulkner's Artistic Vision
Author: Ryūichi Yamaguchi
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838640142

Although William Faulkner's imagination is often considered solely tragic, it actually blended what Faulkner himself called the bizarre and the terrible. Not only did Faulkner's vision encompass both comedy and tragedy; it perceived a latent humor in tragedy and vice versa. As a result, Faulkner's fiction is seldom simply comic or simply tragic. Faulkner's comedy incorporates tragedy and despair, and the humor in his novels may serve as well to intensify as to relieve a tragic or horrific effect. This study examines Faulkner's first nine novels, from Soldiers' Pay to Absalom, Absalom!, showing how humor is used to express theme: how it appears in the action, characters, and discourse of each novel; and how it contributes to the overall effect of each novel. In each case, even in the most pained and angry novels, Faulkner's practice of humor expresses his view that humor is an inseparable element of human experience. Ryuichi Yamaguchi is Professor of English and American literature at the Aichi University in Japan.

Faulkner Studies in Japan

Faulkner Studies in Japan
Author: Thomas L. McHaney
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2008-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0820333638

The universality of William Faulkner's vision was perhaps most formally recognized in 1950, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But even beyond the basic human truths embodied in the people and terrain of Yoknapatawpha County, there is a special kinship between Faulkner's novels and stories of the defeated South and the culture of postwar Japan, itself reeling from the shock of surrender and reconstruction at the hands of a foreign army. Reflecting this kinship, Faulkner Studies in Japan brings together some of the finest critical essays on Faulkner published in Japan in recent years along with discussions by several of Japan's leading novelists of Faulkner's influence on their work. The collection includes essay on broad aspects of Faulkner's writing-the influence of T.S. Eliot on the fiction, the pervasive use of motion imagery-and on such individual works as Light in August and the story of "Was" from Go Down, Moses. The book also presents an overview of Faulkner scholarship in Japan by Kiyoyuki Ono and an Afterword by Carvel Collins that recalls Faulkner's visit to Japan in 1955. At the time of Faulkner's visit, Japanese scholarly interest in his works was already firmly established and in the succeeding years the fascination has, if anything, increased. Commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Faulkner's four-week tour, Faulkner Studies in Japan explore the natural literary sympathy that the novelist himself recognized when he stated: "I believe that something very like [what happened in the American South] will happen here in Japan in the next few years--that out of your despair and disaster will come a group of Japanese writers whom all the world will want to listen to, who will speak not a Japanese truth but a universal truth.

Faulkner and the Politics of Reading

Faulkner and the Politics of Reading
Author: Karl F. Zender
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2023-10-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0807181366

With this study Karl F. Zender offers fresh readings of individual novels, themes, and motifs while also assessing the impact of recent politicized interpretations on our understanding of Faulkner’s achievement. Sympathetically acknowledging the need to decenter the canon, Zender’s searching interrogation of current theory clears a breathing space for Faulkner and his readers between the fustier remnants of New Criticism and the excesses of post-structuralism. Each chapter opens with a balanced presentation of the genuine gifts contemporary theory has bestowed on our comprehension of a particular novel or problem in Faulkner criticism and then proceeds with a groundbreaking reading. “The Politics of Incest” challenges older psychoanalytic interpretations of Faulkner’s use of the incest motif, and “Faulkner’s Privacy” defends the novelist’s difficulty or “reticence” as an aesthetic resistance against the rude candor of deregionalized and depersonalized culture. Subsequent chapters take up the volatile issues of Faulkner’s representations of women and of African Americans, and a close reading of the classic “Barn Burning” critiques the current tendency to blur the concepts of patriarchy and paternity. The elegiac final chapter, “Where is Yoknapatawpha County?” draws on a comparison with John Updike’s Pennsylvania fiction and a reading of Joan Williams’s The Wintering to explore Faulkner’s disinclination to represent the quotidian realities of southern life in his later novels. Zender shows that Faulkner’s stylistic withdrawal attempts to “transform into beauty” his alienation from the postwar world and his fear of aging. That Faulkner and the Politics of Reading itself recovers and gives new luster to Faulkner’s beauty will surely please, in the author’s words, “those readers . . . for whom literature is less a mechanism of social change than a source of pleasure.” The originality of its critical vision will inspire Faulkner scholars, students of American literature, and general readers.

Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century

Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Robert W. Hamblin
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2009-09-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781604730425

A turn-of-the-century map of where Faulkner studies have traveled and where they are headed

Faulkner's Media Romance

Faulkner's Media Romance
Author: Julian Murphet
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2017-07-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0190664258

This book treats William Faulkner's major fiction--from Flags in the Dust through to Absalom, Absalom!--to a searching reappraisal under the spotlight of a media-historical inquiry. It proposes that Faulkner's inveterate attraction to the paradigms of romance was disciplined and masked by the recurrent use of metaphorical figures borrowed from the new media ecology. Faulkner dressed up his romance materials in the technological garb of radio, gramophony, photography, and cinema, along with the transportational networks of road and air that were being installed in the 1920s. His modernism emerges from a fraght but productive interplay between his anachronistic predilection for chivalric chichés and his extraordinarily knowledgeable interest in the most up-to-date media institutions and forms. Rather than see Faulkner as a divided author, who worked for money in the magazines and studios while producing his serious fiction in despite of their symbolic economies, this study demonstrates how profoundly his mature art was shot through with the figures and dynamics of the materials he publicly repudiated. The result is a richer and more nuanced understanding of the dialectics of his art.