Product Description
by Annette Trefzer (Editor), Ann J. Abadie (Editor)
Faulkner and Formalism: Returns of the Text collects eleven essays in which contributors query the status of Faulkner's literary text in contemporary criticism and scholarship. How do scholars today approach Faulkner's texts? For some, including Arthur F. Kinney and James B. Carothers, "returns of the text" is a phrase that raises questions of aesthetics, poetics, and authority. For others, the phrase serves as an invitation to return to Faulkner's language, to writing and the letter itself. Serena Blount, Owen Robinson, James Harding, and Taylor Hagood interpret "returns of the text" in the sense in which Roland Barthes characterizes this shift in his seminal essay "From Work to Text." Faulkner's language itself is under close scrutiny in some of the readings that emphasize a deconstructive or a semiological approach to his writing. Historical and cultural contexts continue to play significant roles, however, in many of the essays such as those by Thadious Davis, Ted Atkinson, Martyn Bone, and Ethel Young-Minor. Instead of approaching the literary text as a reflection, a representation of that context, these readings stress the role of the text as a challenge to the power of external ideological systems. By retaining a bond with new historicist analysis and cultural studies, these essays are illustrative of a kind of analysis that carefully preserves attention to Faulkner's sociopolitical environment. The concluding essay by Theresa M. Towner issues an invitation to return to Faulkner's less well-known short stories for critical exposure and the pleasure of reading.
Author Biography
Annette Trefzer is professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She is author of Exposing Mississippi: Eudora Welty's Photographic Reflections and Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction and coeditor of Global Faulkner; Faulkner's Sexualities; Faulkner and Mystery; and Faulkner and the Native South, all published by University Press of Mississippi, and her work has appeared in many journals. Ann J. Abadie is former associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and coeditor of numerous scholarly collections from the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference.
