Faulkner and the Politics of Reading

ISBN-10: 0807127612
ISBN-13: 9780807127612
Category: Literary Criticism
Pages: 200
Language: English
Published: 2002-05-01
Publisher: LSU Press
Author: Karl F. Zender

Description

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.

Get the book

Similar books

Virginia Woolf and the Great War
By Karen L. Levenback
I owe special thanks to Bruce Martin and Evelyn Timberlake ( at the Library of Congress ) ; Philip Milato and Steve Crook ( at the Berg Collection ) ...
In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship
By Karen Bojar
... Alice: “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens” 157 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 38 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 21 Wilson, Emily (trans.
Native American Verbal Art: Texts and Contexts
By William M. Clements
HENRY TIMBERLAKE'S CHEROKEE WAR SONG 1. That Timberlake's memoir contains the first English translation of the words of a Native American song seems to have ...
Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature
By William H Bridges
“Justin Timberlake, 'The 20/20 Experience': Is There a Visual Preference for Whiteness?” Interview with Marc Lamont Hill. HuffPost Live, 27 March 2013.
Shakespeare's Edward III
By William Shakespeare
Thompson , E . in Pollard 1923 . Thompson , J . Shakespeare and the Classics , 1952 . Tillyard , E . Shakespeare ' s History Plays , 1944 . Timberlake , P ...
The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents
By Laura Frost
In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic ...
The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World
By Laura White
Similarly, he deplored the picturestories of A. B. Frost in his Stuff and Nonsense ... When he'd eaten eighteen, He turned perfectly green, Upon which he ...
Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century
By Laura Brown
Renew'd by ordure's sympathetic force, As oil'd with magic juices for the course, ... William Frost (1953; reprint, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ...
Questions of Authority: Italian and Australian Travel Narratives of the Long Nineteenth Century
By Laura Olcelli
D'Albertis, Luigi. New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw. 2 vols. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881. First published 1880.
A Concordance to Conrad's The Arrow of Gold
By Paul L. Gaston, Todd K. Bender
... i ge 3 let S deal ing ge a lings ge at t Joe a f J & at n ce at h-ced ge at hly ue to 3 sec ge is a te debit de cap it a t e u ge c e it ful ge c e i ve ...