Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Faulkner's Literary Historiography: Color, Photography, And The Accessible Past, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

This paper looks at changes in visual representation in the 1930s as a means of understanding Faulkner's newly historiographic methods in this decade. The advent of Kodachrome® in 1935 as the first widely used color film stock presaged the turn toward the black-and-white documentary mode so important to the nation's efforts to "countenance," or see, the economic crises of the period. Faulkner's descriptive and representational practices in the period 1929-36 also shifted from a more pervasive use of coloration to a style like the silver halide photos prevalent in the middle nineteenth century--the period of the past-tense events in Absalom, …

Inside And Outside Southern Whiteness: Film Viewing, The Frame, And The Racing Of Space In Yoknapatawpha, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Though neither film nor film viewing is ever named in As I Lay Dying, both the apparatus of cinema and what we might term its sociohistorical effects are evoked powerfully by and in the novel. These include the passing before the reader’s “gaze” of the discrete, separate “frames” of the various characters’ monologues, as well as, in particular section, a fascination with watching machinery that resembled the interest of early film biewers in the cinematic apparatus (see Doane 108).

If Vardaman and his family are not explicitly depicted as film viewers, they nevertheless show signs of what has been …

Faulkner's Sexualized City: Modernism, Commerce, And The (Textual) Body, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Such classicism is the aesthetic opposite of what Faulkner demonstrates at moments in Mosquitoes and that would go on to become his famously baroque style. In the discussion that follows, I will be asking a number of questions about that development, among them the following: What is the role in Faulkner of a baroque, highly refined language, especially when Faulkner uses it to convey sexuality? And what connections (or disconnections) might that style have to Faulkner’s use of the setting of the city, as in Mosquitoes, or elsewhere of the rural countryside? As we will see, changes in these …

Kinds Of Faulknerians, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

There are, it seems, two kinds of Faulknerians. Or there used to be. Although not contending critical camps per se, these two approaches to the long career of this modernist from the American south nevertheless partake of very different ways of considering the canonical writer. In the process, they seek to maintain Faulkner’s continuing relevance in ways that say much about his contribution to a uniquely American and regional modernism as well as a body of work marked, particularly in his later novels, by post-Second World War—if not also postmodern—practices and concerns.

The French Faulkner: Vision, Instrumentality, And Sanctuary's 'Lake Of Ink', Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Like Edgar Allan Poe and the American film noir, William Faulkner enjoyed a critical reception in France that anticipated his American audience by several years. While not the first critics to admire Faulkner’s writing, readers like Maurice Coindreau, Andre Malraux, and Jean-Paul Sartre were among the earliest readers to recognize a particular quality to his fiction, one that, especially in the case of certain novels, evaded Faulkner’s contemporary American readers. As certain examples of this cross-cultural acceptance demonstrate, such as Baudelair’s translation of Poe in the nineteenth century and his exalting of Poe as a poetic genius, or Raymond …

Cultural-Studies Criticism, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Faulkner’s “career” within cultural studies began, within the history of the cultural-studies movement itself, comparatively late. This is not an especially remarkable point about Faulkner or any one particular writers; as a critical movement, cultural studies was never concerned more with any one figure than another, and was always concerned with an interdisciplinary and interdiscursive focus rather than a writer’s singularity. It is a point worth noting, however, because of the specific ways in which Faulkner’s work seems hospitable to cultural studies’ concerns. From his earliest stages of writing, Faulkner was aware of his work’s position within a field of …

Querying The Modernist Canon: Historical Consciousness And The Sexuality Of Suffering In Faulkner And Hart Crane, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

The extended historical “moments” that Crane and Faulkner both seek to offer readers may then be defined by their affinities with pain. In the context of American history, that painfulness refers to the experience of historical subjects such as the American Indian as well as marginalized populations like Southern blacks and, as with young Thomas Sutpen, rural poor whites. What both Faulkner and Crane signal in key sections of their work is the way that historical awareness, on the part of either characters or readers, is activated by and necessitates a textual effect of suffering. It is the different valence …

Screening Readerly Pleasures: Modernism, Melodrama, And Mass Markets In If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Although Faulkner had already, with his earlier fiction, established himself as a practitioner of a rarefied, regional modernism, in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem he addresses the reading tastes and pleasures of the commercial market. Commenting as he does on the doctor and his wife’s tastes in the novel’s opening, Faulkner reveals his disdain for people who prefer the culture industry’s generic products to something more personal or idiosyncratic. Yet as his potential audience, those people or their tastes were of interest to Faulkner in 1939, the year the novel appeared. Following extended periods working in Hollywood, as well as …