Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Faulkner and the Politics of Reading

Faulkner and the Politics of Reading

Zender, Karl F.
Hobson, Fred

Hardcover

Series: Southern Literary Studies

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0807127612
ISBN13: 9780807127612
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: May 1 2002
Pages: 200
Weight: 0.94
Height: 0.83 Width: 5.88 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

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.

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