American Studies Commons^™

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 …