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Reading Faulknerian Tragedy illuminates theories of reading and of tragedy as it poses new questions in respect to four of Faulkner's major novels. Drawing on the work of the literary theorists Kenneth Burke and Mikhail Bakhtin and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Warwick Wadlington gives a coherent account of the aesthetics of Faulkner's tragedy and advocates a model of reading based not on interpretation but on performance.
"This could be the best Faulkner study of the decade, the counterpart of Vickery in the 50s and Brooks in the 60s. It is ambitious,powerfully well-informed, and quite as pathbreaking in its approach as one would expect from the author of The Confidence Game in American Literature." -Gary Lee Stonum, Department of English, Case Western Reserve University Reading Faulknerian Tragedy illuminates theories of reading and of tragedy as it poses new questions in respect to four of Faulkner's major novels. Drawing on the work of the literary theorists Kenneth Burke and Mikhail Bakhtin and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Warwick Wadlington gives a coherent account of the aesthetics of Faulkner's tragedy and advocates a model of reading based not on interpretation but on performance. Faulkner's voice, he asserts, functions as an invitation to readers to assume roles, become speakers and thus listeners, and so in a sense complete the text they are reading, and to take pleasure in or suffer the consequences of their role-taking. Offering an "anthropology of rhetoric," Wadlington examines the cultural contexts of Faulkner's writing and describes a kind of tragedy springing from the possibilities of heroic existence in a culture that stresses honor and shame. He defines tragedy as part of a historical, genealogical process, and locates the reading and writing of tragedy within the distinctly human opposition to personal mortality. In his view, reading epitomizes the performance of the scripts of culture itself, and it is one of the cultural activities that constitute persons by furnishing them with the very power to exist. Wadlington offers detailed analyses of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! Rich and provocative in its implications for literary theorists as well as for Faulknerians, the book will also be welcomed by specialists and students of twentieth-century American literature and the novel.
Set in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, As I Lay Dying tells the story of the dysfunctional Bundren family as they set out to fulfill Addie Bundren’s dying wish. Told by fifteen narrators, including Jewel, Cash, Darl and Dewey Dell, As I Lay Dying uses stream of consciousness to unveil each character’s motivations for carrying out Addie’s wish, along with a multitude of lies they have been hiding from each other. As I Lay Dying was Faulkner’s fifth novel and is included in the Modern Library’s list of 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel inspired a number of critically-acclaimed books including Graham Swift’s Last Orders and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body: A Novel. The title, which inspired the name of the Grammy-nominated band As I Lay Dying, is derived from Homer’s The Odyssey. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
This book is a powerful discussion of the novels, short stories, and poems of William Faulkner. Intended for both the general reader as well as those already fully acquainted with his work, My Mother is a Fish illustrates the wisdom and genius of this great modernist of classical twentieth century American Literature. Janet C. Nosek provides a personal commentary on quotations and short passages that show the wide range of style, language, themes, and connections found in Faulkner's fiction. Both instructive and entertaining, this book will be of great interest to literary scholars and a helpful ancillary text as well.
Provides a collection of critical essays on Faulkner's As I lay dying.
An examination of how Faulkner's work has been analyzed, elucidated, and promoted by a massive body of scholarly work spanning over seven decades.
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, in this reconsideration of Faulkner's life and legacy. William Faulkner, one of America’s most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance—his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South—demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate’s life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon. Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions—and perhaps because of them—William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner’s biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was “the South’s curse and its separate destiny,” a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South’s revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a “Lost Cause” romanticism not only defined Faulkner’s twentieth century but now even our own age. Through Gorra’s critical lens, Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America’s history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, “was” and “again.” Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that “the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning.” Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra’s travels through the South—including Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi—and commentaries on Faulkner’s fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.
This bibliography brings up through 1989 the comprehensive listing of scholarship and criticism on William Faulkner begun by Bassett in two earlier books, William Faulkner: An Annotated Checklist of Criticism (1972) and Faulkner: An Annotated Checklist of Recent Criticism (1983). Since the latter, over a hundred books on Faulkner have been completed, along with hundreds of articles and dissertations. This work lists all new items, often with extensive annotations, and provides separate entries for chapters of books that cover individual novels and stories. Bassett's introductory essay provides an overview of the last decade of Faulkner studies, the first in which post-structuralist and other newer forms of criticism had a major impact on Faulkner studies.
Praise for the earlier edition: "Students of modern American literature have for some years turned to Fifteen Modern American Authors (1969) as an indispensable guide to significant scholarship and criticism about twentieth-century American writers. In its new form--Sixteenth Modern American Authors--it will continue to be indispensable. If it is not a desk-book for all Americanists, it is a book to be kept in the forefront of the bibliographical compartment of their brains."--American Studies
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.