Faulkner and Popular Culture PDF Download

Author: Doreen Fowler
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617035548
Category : Popular culture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Peter Lurie
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801879299
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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"Lurie takes particular interest in the influence of cinema on Faulkner's fiction and the visual strategies he both deployed and critiqued. These include the suggestion of cinematic viewing on the part of readers and of characters in each of the novels; the collective and individual acts of voyeurism in Sanctuary and Light in August; the exposing in Absalom! Absalom! and Light in August of stereotypical and cinematic patterns of thought about history and race; and the evocation of popular forms like melodrama and the movie screen in If I forget thee, Jerusalem. Offering innovative readings of these canonical works, this study sheds new light on Faulkner's uniquely American modernism."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Doreen Fowler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780878054336
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Here scholars seek out the influence of popular culture upon the Nobel Prize author & note his forays into the pop culture world.

Author: Ted Atkinson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082033085X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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“Remarkably,” writes Ted Atkinson, “during a period roughly corresponding to the Great Depression, Faulkner wrote the novels and stories most often read, taught, and examined by scholars.” This is the first comprehensive study to consider his most acclaimed works in the context of those hard times. Atkinson sees Faulkner’s Depression-era novels and stories as an ideological battleground--in much the same way that 1930s America was. With their contrapuntal narratives that present alternative accounts of the same events, these works order multiple perspectives under the design of narrative unity. Thus, Faulkner’s ongoing engagement with cultural politics gives aesthetic expression to a fundamental ideological challenge of Depression-era America: how to shape what FDR called a “new order of things” out of such conflicting voices as the radical left, the Popular Front, and the Southern Agrarians. Focusing on aesthetic decadence in Mosquitoes and dispossession in The Sound and the Fury, Atkinson shows how Faulkner anticipated and mediated emergent sociocultural forces of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In Sanctuary; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; and “Dry September,” Faulkner explores social upheaval (in the form of lynching and mob violence), fascism, and the appeal of strong leadership during troubled times. As I Lay Dying, The Hamlet, “Barn Burning,” and “The Tall Men” reveal his “ambivalent agrarianism”--his sympathy for, yet anxiety about, the legions of poor and landless farmers and sharecroppers. In The Unvanquished, Faulkner views Depression concerns through the historical lens of the Civil War, highlighting the forces of destruction and reconstruction common to both events. Faulkner is no proletarian writer, says Atkinson. However, the dearth of overt references to the Depression in his work is not a sign that Faulkner was out of touch with the times or consumed with aesthetics to the point of ignoring social reality. Through his comprehensive social vision and his connections to the rural South, Hollywood, and New York, Faulkner offers readers remarkable new insight into Depression concerns.

Author: Charles Hannon
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807143685
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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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.

Author: Diane Roberts
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780820317410
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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This study examines the vexed and contradictory responses of the South's most celebrated novelist to the traditional representations of women that were bequeathed to him by his culture. Tracing the ways in which William Faulkner characterized women in his fiction, Diane Roberts posits six familiar representations--the Confederate woman, the mammy, the tragic mulatta, the new belle, the spinster, and the mother--and through close feminist readings shows how the writer reactivated and reimagined them. "As a southerner," Roberts writes, "Faulkner inherited the images, icons, and demons of his culture. They are part of the matter of the region with which he engages, sometimes accepting, sometimes rejecting." Drawing on extensive research into southern popular culture and the findings and interpretations of historians, Roberts demonstrates how Faulkner's greatest fiction, published during the 1920s and 1930s, grew out of his reactions to the South's extreme and sometimes violent attempts to redefine and solidify its hierarchical conceptions of race, gender, and class. Struggling to understand his region, Roberts says, Faulkner exposed the South's self-conceptions as quite precarious, with women slipping toward masculinity, men slipping toward femininity, and white identity slipping toward black. At their best, according to Roberts, Faulkner's novels reveal the South's failure to reassert the boundaries of race, gender, and class by which it has traditionally sustained itself.

Author: Jay Watson
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 149681231X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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With contributions by Greg Barnhisel, John N. Duvall, Kristin Fujie, Sarah E. Gardner, Jaime Harker, Kristi Rowan Humphreys, Robert Jackson, Mary A. Knighton, Jennifer Nolan, Carl Rollyson, Tim A. Ryan, Jay Satterfield, Erin A. Smith, Jay Watson, and Yung-Hsing Wu William Faulkner's first ventures into print culture began far from the world of highbrow New York publishing houses such as Boni & Liveright or Random House and little magazines such as the Double Dealer. With that diverse publishing history in mind, this collection explores Faulkner's multifaceted engagements, as writer and reader, with the US and international print cultures of his era, along with how these cultures have mediated his relationship with various twentieth- and twenty-first-century audiences. These essays address the place of Faulkner and his writings in the creation, design, publishing, marketing, reception, and collecting of books; in the culture of twentieth-century magazines, journals, newspapers, and other periodicals (from pulp to avant-garde); in the history of modern readers and readerships; and in the construction and cultural politics of literary authorship. Several contributors focus on Faulkner's sensational 1931 novel Sanctuary to illustrate the author's multifaceted relationship to the print ecology of his time, tracing the novel's path from the wellsprings of Faulkner's artistic vision to the novel's reception among reviewers, tastemakers, intellectuals, and other readers of the early 1930s. Other essayists discuss Faulkner's early notices, the Saturday Review of Literature, Saturday Evening Post, men's magazines of the 1950s, and Cold War modernism.

Author: Peter Lurie
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421427559
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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William Faulkner occupied a unique position as a modern writer. Although famous for his modernist novels and their notorious difficulty, he also wrote extensively for the "culture industry," and the works he produced for it—including short stories, adaptations, and screenplays—bore many of the hallmarks of consumer art. His experiences as a Hollywood screenwriter influenced him in a number of ways, many of them negative, while the films turned out by the "dream factories" in which he labored sporadically inspired both his interest and his contempt. Faulkner also disparaged the popular magazines—though he frequently sold short stories to them. To what extent was Faulkner's deeply ambivalent relationship to—and involvement with—American popular culture reflected in his modernist or "art" fiction? Peter Lurie finds convincing evidence that Faulkner was keenly aware of commercial culture and adapted its formulae, strategies, and in particular, its visual techniques into the language of his novels of the 1930s. Lurie contends that Faulkner's modernism can be best understood in light of his reaction to the popular culture of his day. Using Theodor Adorno's theory about modern cultural production as a framework, Lurie's close readings of Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem uncover the cultural history that surrounded and influenced the development of Faulkner's art. Lurie is particularly interested in the influence of cinema on Faulkner's fiction and especially the visual strategies he both deployed and critiqued. These include the suggestion of cinematic viewing on the part of readers and of characters in each of the novels; the collective and individual acts of voyeurism in Sanctuary and Light in August; the exposing in Absalom! Absalom! and Light in Augustof stereotypical and cinematic patterns of thought about history and race; and the evocation of popular forms like melodrama and the movie screen in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Offering innovative readings of these canonical works, this study sheds new light on Faulkner's uniquely American modernism.

Author: Joel Williamson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195356403
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 539

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One of America's great novelists, William Faulkner was a writer deeply rooted in the American South. In works such as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner drew powerfully on Southern themes, attitudes, and atmosphere to create his own world and place--the mythical Yoknapatawpha County--peopled with quintessential Southerners such as the Compsons, Sartorises, Snopes, and McCaslins. Indeed, to a degree perhaps unmatched by any other major twentieth-century novelist, Faulkner remained at home and explored his own region--the history and culture and people of the South. Now, in William Faulkner and Southern History, one of America's most acclaimed historians of the South, Joel Williamson, weaves together a perceptive biography of Faulkner himself, an astute analysis of his works, and a revealing history of Faulkner's ancestors in Mississippi--a family history that becomes, in Williamson's skilled hands, a vivid portrait of Southern culture itself. Williamson provides an insightful look at Faulkner's ancestors, a group sketch so brilliant that the family comes alive almost as vividly as in Faulkner's own fiction. Indeed, his ancestors often outstrip his characters in their colorful and bizarre nature. Williamson has made several discoveries: the Falkners (William was the first to spell it "Faulkner") were not planter, slaveholding "aristocrats"; Confederate Colonel Falkner was not an unalloyed hero, and he probably sired, protected, and educated a mulatto daughter who married into America's mulatto elite; Faulkner's maternal grandfather Charlie Butler stole the town's money and disappeared in the winter of 1887-1888, never to return. Equally important, Williamson uses these stories to underscore themes of race, class, economics, politics, religion, sex and violence, idealism and Romanticism--"the rainbow of elements in human culture"--that reappear in Faulkner's work. He also shows that, while Faulkner's ancestors were no ordinary people, and while he sometimes flashed a curious pride in them, Faulkner came to embrace a pervasive sense of shame concerning both his family and his culture. This he wove into his writing, especially about sex, race, class, and violence, psychic and otherwise. William Faulkner and Southern History represents an unprecedented publishing event--an eminent historian writing on a major literary figure. By revealing the deep history behind the art of the South's most celebrated writer, Williamson evokes new insights and deeper understanding, providing anyone familiar with Faulkner's great novels with a host of connections between his work, his life, and his ancestry.

Author: Michael Gorra
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631491717
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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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.