The Southern Demiurge at Work: Modernism, Literary Theory and William Faulkner's “Dry September”

Abstract

In light of the increasing politicization that can be observed within the discipline of American Studies in the U.S. — with its focus on race, class and gender — and the neglect of matters aesthetic that more often than not accompanies this phenomenon, canonized modernist texts have been cast under something close to a general suspicion. This development, however, has to be seen in the larger context of academic politics, which is provided in Francois Cusset’s recent book French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life in the United States (2008). In it, he diagnoses a split of French post-structuralism into two camps: a school of apolitical textual deconstruction and one of re-politicization based upon identity politics. With the help of a new reading of William Faulkner’s short story “Dry September,” I will argue that this split is both artificial and questionable. I will show that, far from being historically irrelevant or purely mandarin, the aesthetic complexity of modernist texts does not forego but actively addresses (if in a demiurgic fashion) the dangers involved in readings motivated by political agendas such as race and gender.