Faulkner And The Discourses Of Culture (southern Literary Studies) [Hardcover]

Throughout his career, William Faulkner produced a literary discourse remarkably contiguous with other discourses of American culture, but seldom has his work been explored as a participant in the shifts and ruptures that characterize modern discursive systems. Charles Hannon argues in his brilliant new study that the language of Faulkners fiction is replete with the voiced conflicts that shaped America and the South from the 1920s to1950. Specifically, Hannon takes five contemporary debatesin historiography, law, labor, ethnography, and filmand relates them both to canonical and less-discussed texts of Faulkner.

Hannon employs a theoretical middle ground between Michael Bakhtins stylistics of the novel and Michel Foucaults model of discourse as an autonomous self-regulated domain, while also drawing from the vast critical literature on Faulkners fiction. He begins by linking the story cycle The Unvanquished to the battle over interpretations of American history as voiced by the Nashville Agrarians on the one hand and W. E. B. DuBois on the other. Next Hannon shows how Faulkners detective fiction of the early 1930s and portions of his novel The Hamlet were affected by the emerging schism between adherents of a new school of legal realism and those bound to a more conservative formalist jurisprudence. According to Hannon, Faulkners great novel Absalom, Absalom! reflects in its depiction of various forms of labor one of Franklin Roosevelts major New Deal accomplishmentsthe Wagner Act of 1935as well as contract disputes in the agricultural and manufacturing South and in the film studios of Hollywood. Hannon discusses Faulkners experimentation in The Hamlet vis-?-vis the development of the ethnographic method in the field of anthropology. He concludes with a fascinating analysis of the filming of Intruder in the Dust in Faulkners hometown of Oxford, Mississippi.

Through Hannons keen interpretive readings, Faulkners texts emerge as a complex node ló´