Faulkner and the politics of reading

Abstract

With this study Karl F. Zender offers fresh readings of individual novels, themes, and motifs while also assessing the impact of recent politicised interpretations on our understanding of 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. Politics of Incest challenges older psychoanalytic interpretations of 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 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 disinclination to represent the quotidian realities of southern life in his later novels. Zender shows that stylistic withdrawal attempts to transform into 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 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.