Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door 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

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Signifying Eye: Seeing Faulkner's Art

The Signifying Eye: Seeing Faulkner's Art

Waid, Candace

Paperback

Series: New Southern Studies

Art Criticism & TheoryLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 0820350559
ISBN13: 9780820350554
Publisher: Univ Of Georgia Pr
Published: Feb 1 2017
Pages: 408
Weight: 1.09
Height: 1.02 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

A bold book, built of close readings, striking in its range and depth, The Signifying Eye shows Faulkner's art take shape in sweeping arcs of social, labor, and aesthetic history. Beginning with long-unpublished works (his childhood sketches and his hand-drawn and hand-illustrated play The Marionettes) and early novels (Mosquitoes and Sartoris), working through many major works (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!), and including more popular fictions (The Wild Palms and The Unvanquished) and late novels (notably Intruder in the Dust and The Town), The Signifying Eye reveals Faulkner's visual obsessions with artistic creation as his work is read next to Wharton, Cather, Toomer, and--in a tour de force intervention--Willem de Kooning.

After coloring in southern literature as a reverse slave narrative, Waid's Eye locates Faulkner's fiction as the feminist hinge in a crucial parable of art that seeks abstraction through the burial of the race-defined mother. Race is seen through gender and sexuality while social fall is exposed (in Waid's phrase) as a coloring of class. Locating visual language that constitutes a pictorial vocabulary, The Signifying Eye delights in literacy as the oral meets the written and the abstract opens as a site to see narrative. Steeped in history, this book locates a heightened reality that goes beyond representation to bring Faulkner's novels, stories, and drawings into visible form through Whistler, Beardsley, Gorky, and de Kooning. Visionary and revisionist, Waid has painted the proverbial big picture, changing the fundamental way that both the making of modernism and the avant-garde will be seen.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

Art Criticism & Theory

View All