William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity by Jay Watson

Abstract

Reviewed by: William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity by Jay Watson Michelle E. Moore William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity. By Jay Watson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2020. xv+396 pp. £65. ISBN 978–0–19–884974–2. It would seem that there is not much left to be said about the literary giant William Faulkner and his relationship to modernism, but in the last fifteen years multiple studies have begun reassessing what Faulkner means to American modernism. The new modernism of the 1990s, with its emphasis on historicization, materiality, and the technological changes of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ushered in new possibilities not just for studies of modernism, but for all literary studies. Sarah Gleeson White’s William Faulkner and Twentieth Century-Fox (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) and Peter Lurie’s Vision’s Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) rework his relationships to the film industry and popular culture. Leigh Anne Duck’s The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and US Nationalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006) emphasizes Faulkner’s place in an expansive cultural history of the American South. John T. Matthews’s William Faulkner: Seeing through the South (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) reimagines Faulkner’s entire relationship to the post-Civil War South’s modernization. The forty-seventh annual Faulkner and Yoknapawtapha Conference, scheduled to be held in late July of 2020, was themed ‘Faulkner’s Modernisms’, and it had promised to reconsider Faulkner studies among competing ‘nested geographies’ and relocate it among new approaches to modernism. William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity is a welcome and long overdue addition to modernism and Faulkner studies. Jay Watson’s ultimate goal is that [End Page 123] ‘by returning to the utterly uncontroversial fact of Faulkner’s modernism with a critical sensibility sharpened by new modernism studies, this book will spark further reappraisal of a distinguished and quite dazzling body of work’ (p. 37). The book is well organized into four sections that progress both thematically and chronologically. The first, ‘Rural Modernization’, has two chapters: ‘Rus in Urbe: Faulkner’s Rural Modernizers’ and ‘The Philosophy of Furniture, or Light in August and the Material Unconscious of Mississippi Modernity’. Each focuses on Faulkner’s ‘depiction and interrogation of modernization in the rural lives, communities, and economies of Yoknapatawpha county’ (p. 29). Part ii, ‘Technology and Media’, considers how Faulkner wrote about and associated with the new machinery of the twentieth century. It contains two chapters, ‘Faulkner on Speed’ and ‘The Unsynchable William Faulkner: Faulknerian Voice and Early Sound Film’. The very timely third section, ‘Racial Modernism’, considers ‘Genealogies of White Deviance: Eugenic Modernity and William Faulkner, 1926–1932’ and ‘Slavery, Modernity, and the Turn towards Death in the Black Atlantic World of Yoknapatwapha County’. The last section has a single chapter: ‘Faulkner’s Biopolitical Fable of Modernity’. In addition, the study also includes extensive discursive endnotes, which, together with the Works Cited section, function as an extensive bibliography of Faulkner criticism and modernist studies. The main strength of Watson’s book is its synthesis of the new modernist studies and theory with the history of Faulkner scholarship. This is the first study that successfully marries the two strains of academic study and it does so with encyclopedic breadth. The depth of the study appears in the sharp and persuasive readings of much read, studied, and taught Faulkner literature that emerges from the synthesis. Connecting Faulkner with American modernism is a valuable and under-appreciated subject whose time has certainly come. An exciting and well-considered study, the book is exceedingly well written and structured. This is the rare scholarly monograph that would be an excellent textbook for seminars on American modernism and Faulkner seminars. Watson succeeds in making the literary giant of modernism ‘new’. Highly recommended. Michelle E. Moore College of DuPage Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association