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The Way the World Works: Essays
Par Nicholson Baker. 1957
Nicholson Baker, who “writes like no one else in America” (Newsweek), here assembles his best short pieces from the last…
fifteen years. The Way the World Works, Baker’s second nonfiction collection, ranges over the map of life to examine what troubles us, what eases our pain, and what brings us joy. Baker moves from political controversy to the intimacy of his own life, from forgotten heroes of pacifism to airplane wings, telephones, paper mills, David Remnick, Joseph Pulitzer, the OED, and the manufacture of the Venetian gondola. He writes about kite string and about the moment he met his wife, and he surveys our fascination with video games while attempting to beat his teenage son at Modern Warfare 2. In a celebrated essay on Wikipedia, Baker describes his efforts to stem the tide of encyclopedic deletionism; in another, he charts the rise of e-readers; in a third he chronicles his Freedom of Information lawsuit against the San Francisco Public Library. Through all these pieces, many written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The American Scholar, Baker shines the light of an inexpugnable curiosity. The Way the World Works is a keen-minded, generous-spirited compendium by a modern American master.New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent
Par Margaret Busby. 2020
The companion to the classic anthology Daughters of Africa—a major international collection that brings together the work of more than…
200 women writers of African descent, celebrating their artistry and showcasing their contributions to modern literature and international culture.Contributors include:Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie • Yrsa Daley Ward • Edwidge Danticat • Phillippa Yrsa De Villiers • Esi Edugyan • Eve Ewing • Nikki Finney • Roxane Gay • Margo Jefferson • Barbara Jenkins • Imbolo Mbue • Nnedi Okorafor • Chinelo Okparanta • Minna Salami • Zadie Smith • and more!Twenty-five years ago, Margaret Busby’s Daughters of Africa was published to international acclaim and hailed as “an extraordinary body of achievement . . . a vital document of lost history” (Sunday Times) and “the ultimate reference guide” (Washington Post). New Daughters of Africa continues that tradition for a new generation.This magnificent follow-up to the original landmark anthology brings together fresh and vibrant voices that have emerged from across the globe in the past two decades, from Antigua to Zimbabwe and Angola to the United States. Key figures, including Margo Jefferson, Nawal El Saadawi, Edwidge Danticat, and Zadie Smith, join popular contemporaries such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Imbolo Mbue, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Taiye Selasi, and Chinelo Okparanta in celebrating the heritage that unites them. Each of the pieces in this remarkable collection demonstrates an uplifting sense of sisterhood, honors the strong links that endure from generation to generation, and addresses the common obstacles female writers of color face as they negotiate issues of race, gender, and class and address vital matters of independence, freedom, and oppression. A glorious portrayal of the richness, magnitude, and range of these visionary writers, New Daughters of Africa spans a range of genres—autobiography, memoir, oral history, letters, diaries, short stories, novels, poetry, drama, humor, politics, journalism, essays, and speeches—demonstrating the diversity and extraordinary literary achievements of black women who remain underrepresented, and whose contributions continue to be underrated in world culture today.City Parks: Public Spaces, Private Thoughts
Par Catie Marron. 2013
Catie Marron’s City Parks captures the spirit and beauty of eighteen of the world’s most-loved city parks. Zadie Smith, Ian…
Frazier, Candice Bergen, Colm Tóibín, Nicole Krauss, Jan Morris, and a dozen other remarkable contributors reflect on a particular park that holds special meaning for them.Andrew Sean Greer eloquently paints a portrait of first love in the Presidio; André Aciman muses on time’s fleeting nature and the changing face of New York viewed from the High Line; Pico Iyer explores hidden places and privacy in Kyoto; Jonathan Alter takes readers from the 1968 race riots to Obama’s 2008 victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park; Simon Winchester invites us along on his adventures in the Maidan; and Bill Clinton writes of his affection for Dumbarton Oaks.Oberto Gili’s color and black-and-white photographs unify the writers’ unique and personal voices. Taken around the world over the course of a year, in every season, his pictures capture the inherent mood of each place. Fusing images and text, City Parks is an extraordinary and unique project: through personal reflection and intimate detail it taps into collective memory and our sense of time’s passage.But You Seemed So Happy: A Marriage, in Pieces and Bits
Par Kimberly Harrington. 2021
In this tender, funny, and sharp companion to her acclaimed memoir-in-essays Amateur Hour, Kimberly Harrington explores and confronts marriage, divorce,…
and the ways love, loss, and longing shape a life.Six weeks after Kimberly and her husband announced their divorce, she began work on a book that she thought would only be about divorce — heavy on the dark humor with a light coating of anger and annoyance. After all, on the heels of planning to dissolve a twenty-year marriage they had chosen to still live together in the same house with their kids. Throw in a global pandemic and her idea of what the end of a marriage should look and feel like was flipped even further on its head. This originally dark and caustic exploration turned into a more empathetic exercise, as she worked to understand what this relationship meant and why marriage matters so much. Over the course of two years of what was supposed to be a temporary period of transition, she sifted through her past—how she formed her ideas about relationships, sex, marriage, and divorce. And she dug back into the history of her marriage — how she and her future ex-husband had met, what it felt like to be madly in love, how they had changed over time, the impact having children had on their relationship, and what they still owed one another.But You Seemed So Happy is a time capsule of sorts. It’s about getting older and repeatedly dying on the hill of being wiser, only to discover you were never all that dumb to begin with. It’s an honest, intimate biography of a marriage, from its heady, idealistic, and easy beginnings to it slowly coming apart and finally to its evolution into something completely unexpected. As she probes what it means when everyone assumes you’re happy as long as you’re still married, Harrington skewers engagement photos, Gen X singularity, small-town busybodies, and the casual way we make life-altering decisions when we’re young. Ultimately, this moving and funny memoir in essays is a vulnerable and irreverent act of forgiveness—of ourselves, our partners, and the relationships that have run their course but will always hold profound and permanent meaning in our lives.The Cavalry Charges: Writings on Books, Film, and Music, Revised Edition
Par Barry Gifford. 2019
The Cavalry Charges: Writings on Books, Film, and Music, Revised Edition is a collection of anecdotal reflections that relate many…
of the experiences that shaped Barry Gifford as a writer. Representative of Gifford’s body of work, this volume is divided into three sections: books, film and television, and music. Within these sections, Gifford’s best work is showcased, including a nine-part dossier on Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks in which Gifford examines the public and private lives of those involved in the film. New to the collection are four previously published essays: a brief look at the novels of Álvaro Mutis; a reflection on Gifford’s schooling under Nebraska poet John Neihardt; an essay on Elliot Chaze and his novel Black Wings Has My Angel; and a short piece on Sailor and Lula.Booker T. Washington in Perspective: Essays of Louis R. Harlan
Par Louis R. Harlan. 1988
This book, an important companion volume to Louis R. Harlan's prize-winning biography of Booker T. Washington, makes available for the…
first time in one collection Harlan's essays on the life and career of the celebrated black leader. Written over a span of a quarter of a century, they present a remarkably rich and complex look at Washington, the educator and leading precursor of the Civil Rights Movement who rose from slavery to be the dominant force in black America at the opening of the twentieth century. Harlan's mastery of biography is revealed in essays printed here exploring the nature of biographical writing. Readers interested in the art of historiography and biography will find here Harlan's essays detailing his experience in crafting his acclaimed biography of Washington, which received two Bancroft Awards, the Beveridge Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Booker T. Washington in Perspective reveals Harlan as historian and biographer in the essays that were the prelude to his masterwork.Things like the Truth: Out of My Later Years
Par Ellen Gilchrist. 2016
Winner of the National Book Award and the author of numerous highly praised works of fiction and nonfiction, Ellen Gilchrist…
is also a daughter, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother who takes delight in her large, wonderful family. Things like the Truth offers a collection of nonfiction essays about Ellen Gilchrist's life, family, home, work, aging, and the fun of fighting to stay healthy in an increasingly undisciplined culture. This collection brings together for the first time essays by Ellen Gilchrist on her later life and family. Essays such as “The Joy of Swimming” reveal how Gilchrist, as an aging person, thinks about the joys one can discover late in life. Other essays focus on surgery, money, childhood memories, changing perspectives, and the vagaries of the age. Gilchrist pays special attention to her evolving relationships with her adult children and the pleasures and pitfalls of being a grandmother and great-grandmother. The volume also includes essays from her diary about the sense of place in her mountain home near her work at the University of Arkansas and about life after Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, her second residence. Reviewers have praised Gilchrist's “deliciously wise and humorous voice” in her stories and that same voice pours forth in these essays. Gilchrist takes delight in the foibles of human behavior and searches for humor and wisdom in every situation. She also loves to give advice, and happily dispenses guidance to fans, family, and anyone in a grocery store line. This collection of essays presents Gilchrist at her best. Engaging, funny, and fearless, she describes the joys and difficulties of a well-lived life. Her fans will devour these essays and will revel again in the company of an author they know so well. Both personal and profound, with plenty of humor, this collection allows Gilchrist's inimitable spirit to shine throughout.Faulkner's Inheritance: Faulkner And Yoknapatawpha 2005 (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)
Par Joseph R. Urgo. 2007
Essays by Susan V. Donaldson, Lael Gold, Adam Gussow, Martin Kreiswirth, Jay Parini, Noel Polk, Judith L. Sensibar, Jon Smith,…
and Priscilla Wald William Faulkner once said that the writer “collects his material all his life from everything he reads, from everything he listens to, everything he sees, and he stores that away in sort of a filing cabinet . . . in my case it's not anything near as neat as a filing case; it's more like a junk box.” Faulkner tended to be quite casual about his influences. For example, he referred to the South as “not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and don't have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time.” His Christian background, according to him, was simply another tool he might pick up on one of his visits to “the lumber room” that would help him tell a story. Sometimes he claimed he never read James Joyce's Ulysses or had never heard of Thomas Mann—writers he would elsewhere declare as “the two great men in my time.” Sometimes he expressed annoyance at readers who found esoteric theory in his fiction, when all he wanted them to find was Faulkner: “I have never read [Freud]. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby-Dick didn't.” Nevertheless, Faulkner's life was rich in what he did, saw, and read, and he seems to have remembered all of it and put it to use in his fiction. Faulkner's Inheritance is a collection of essays that examines the influences on Faulkner's fiction, including his own family history, Jim Crow laws, contemporary fashion, popular culture, and literature.Down on the Batture
Par Oliver A. Houck. 2010
The lower Mississippi River winds past the city of New Orleans between enormous levees and a rim of sand, mud,…
and trees called “the batture.” On this remote and ignored piece of land thrives a humanity unique to the region—ramblers, artists, drinkers, fishers, rabbit hunters, dog walkers, sunset watchers, and refugees from immigration, alimony, and other aspects of modern life. Author Oliver A. Houck has frequented this place for the past twenty-five years. Down on the Batture describes a life, pastoral, at times marginal, but remarkably fecund and surprising. From this place he meditates on Louisiana, the state of the waterway, and its larger environs. He describes all the actors who have played lead roles on the edge of the mightiest river of the continent, and includes in his narrative plantations, pollution, murder, land grabs, keelboat brawlers, slave rebellions, the Corps of Engineers, and the oil industry. Houck draws from his experience in New Orleans since the early 1970s in the practice and teaching of law. He has been a player in many of the issues he describes, although he does not undertake to argue them here. Instead, story by story, he uses the batture to explore the forces that have shaped and spell out the future of the region. The picture emerges of a place that—for all its tangle of undergrowth, drifting humanity, shifting dimensions in the rise and fall of floodwater—provides respite and sanctuary for values that are original to America and ever at risk from the homogenizing forces of civilization.Southern Writers on Writing
Par Susan Cushman. 2018
Contributions by Julie Cantrell, Katherine Clark, Susan Cushman, Jim Dees, Clyde Edgerton, W. Ralph Eubanks, John M. Floyd, Joe Formichella,…
Patti Callahan Henry, Jennifer Horne, Ravi Howard, Suzanne Hudson, River Jordan, Harrison Scott Key, Cassandra King, Alan Lightman, Sonja Livingston, Corey Mesler, Niles Reddick, Wendy Reed, Nicole Seitz, Lee Smith, Michael Farris Smith, Sally Palmer Thomason, Jacqueline Allen Trimble, M. O. Walsh, and Claude Wilkinson The South is often misunderstood on the national stage, characterized by its struggles with poverty, education, and racism, yet the region has yielded an abundance of undeniably great literature. In Southern Writers on Writing, Susan Cushman collects twenty-six writers from across the South whose work celebrates southern culture and shapes the landscape of contemporary southern literature. Contributors hail from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida. Contributors such as Lee Smith, Michael Farris Smith, W. Ralph Eubanks, and Harrison Scott Key, among others, explore issues like race, politics, and family and the apex of those issues colliding. It discusses landscapes, voices in the South, and how writers write. The anthology is divided into six sections, including “Becoming a Writer;” “Becoming a Southern Writer;” “Place, Politics, People;” “Writing about Race;” “The Craft of Writing;” and “A Little Help from My Friends.”A Comics Studies Reader
Par Jeet Heer. 2008
Contributions by Thomas Andrae, Martin Barker, Bart Beaty, John Benson, David Carrier, Hillary Chute, Peter Coogan, Annalisa Di Liddo, Ariel…
Dorfman, Thierry Groensteen, Robert C. Harvey, Charles Hatfield, M. Thomas Inge, Gene Kannenberg Jr., David Kasakove, Adam L. Kern, David Kunzle, Pascal Lefèvre, John A. Lent, W. J. T. Mitchell, Amy Kiste Nyberg, Fusami Ogi, Robert S. Petersen, Anne Rubenstein, Roger Sabin, Gilbert Seldes, Art Spiegelman, Fredric Wertham, and Joseph WitekA Comics Studies Reader offers the best of the new comics scholarship in nearly thirty essays on a wide variety of such comics forms as gag cartoons, editorial cartoons, comic strips, comic books, manga, and graphic novels.The anthology covers the pioneering work of Rodolphe Töpffer, the Disney comics of Carl Barks, and the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware, as well as Peanuts, romance comics, and superheroes. It explores the stylistic achievements of manga, the international anti-comics campaign, and power and class in Mexican comic books and English illustrated stories.A Comics Studies Reader introduces readers to the major debates and points of reference that continue to shape the field. It will interest anyone who wants to delve deeper into the world of comics and is ideal for classroom use.Faulkner's Geographies: Faulkner And Yoknapatawpha, 2011 (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)
Par Jay Watson, Ann J. Abadie. 2015
The recent spatial turn in social theory and cultural studies opens up exciting new possibilities for the study of William…
Faulkner's literature. The fictional domains of Yoknapatawpha County and Jefferson, Mississippi, are not simply imagined communities but imaginative geographies of remarkable complexity and detail, as evidenced by the maps Faulkner created of his “apocryphal” county. Exploring the diverse functions of space in Faulkner's artistic vision, the eleven essays in Faulkner's Geographies delve deep into Yoknapatawpha but also reach beyond it to uncover unsuspected connections and flows linking local, regional, national, hemispheric, and global geographies in Faulkner's writings. Individual contributions examine the influence of the plantation as a land-use regime on Faulkner's imagination of north Mississippi's geography; the emergence of “micro-Souths” as a product of modern migratory patterns in the urban North of Faulkner's fiction; the enlistment of the author's work in the geopolitics of the cultural Cold War during the 1950s; the historical and literary affiliations between Faulkner's Deep South and Greater Mexico; the local and idiosyncratic as alternatives to region and nation; the unique intersection of regional and metropolitan geographies that Faulkner encountered as a novice writer immersed in the literary culture of New Orleans; the uses of feminist geography to trace the interplay of gender, space, and movement; and the circulation of Caribbean and “Black South” spaces and itineraries through Faulkner's masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom! By bringing new attention to the function of space, place, mapping, and movement in his literature, Faulkner's Geographies seeks to redraw the very boundaries of Faulkner studies.Faulkner's Sexualities: Dana Andrews (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)
Par Faulkner. 2010
William Faulkner grew up and began his writing career during a time of great cultural upheaval, especially in the realm…
of sexuality, where every normative notion of identity and relationship was being re-examined. Not only does Faulkner explore multiple versions of sexuality throughout his work, but he also studies the sexual dimension of various social, economic, and aesthetic concerns. In Faulkner's Sexualities, contributors query Faulkner's life and fiction in terms of sexual identity, sexual politics, and the ways in which such concerns affect his aesthetics. Given the frequent play with sexual norms and practices, how does Faulkner's fiction constitute the sexual subject in relation to the dynamics of the body, language, and culture? In what ways does Faulkner participate in discourses of masculinity and femininity, desire and reproduction, heterosexuality and homosexuality? In what ways are these discourses bound up with representations of race and ethnicity, modernity and ideology, region and nation? In what ways do his texts touch on questions concerning the racialization of categories of gender within colonial and dominant metropolitan discourses and power relations? Is there a southern sexuality? This volume wrestles with these questions and relates them to theories of race, gender, and sexuality.Richard Wright's Travel Writings: New Reflections
Par Virginia Whatley Smith. 2001
Attracted to remote lands by his interest in the postcolonial struggle, Richard Wright (1908-1960) became one of the few African…
Americans of his time to engage in travel writing. He went to emerging nations not as a sightseer but as a student of their cultures, learning the politics and the processes of social transformation. When Wright fled from the United States in 1946 to live as an expatriate in Paris, he was exposed to intellectual thoughts and challenges that transcended his social and political education in America. Three events broadened his world view—his introduction to French existentialism, the rise of the Pan-Africanist movement to decolonize Africa, and Indonesia's declaration of independence from colonial rule in 1945. During the 1950s as he traveled to emerging nations, his encounters produced four travel narratives—Black Power (1953), The Color Curtain (1956), Pagan Spain (1956), and White Man, Listen! (1957). Upon his death in 1960, he left behind an unfinished book on French West Africa, which exists only in notes, outlines, and a draft. Written by multinational scholars, this collection of essays exploring Wright's travel writings shows how in his hands the genre of travel writing resisted, adapted, or modified the forms and formats practiced by white authors. Enhanced by nine photographs taken by Wright during his travels, the essays focus on each of Wright's four separate narratives as well as upon his unfinished book and reveal how Wright drew on such non-Western influences as the African American slave narrative and Asian literature of protest and resistance. The essays critique Wright's representation of customs and people and employ a broad range of interpretive modes, including the theories of formalism, feminism, and postmodernism, among others. Wright's travel books are proven to be innovative narratives that laid down the roots of such later genres as postcolonial literature, contemporary travel writing, and resistance literature.Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature
Par Amritjit Singh, Peter Schmidt. 2000
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we may be in a “transnational” moment, increasingly aware of the ways in…
which local and national narratives, in literature and elsewhere, cannot be conceived apart from a radically new sense of shared human histories and global interdependence. To think transnationally about literature, history, and culture requires a study of the evolution of hybrid identities within nation-states and diasporic identities across national boundaries. Studies addressing issues of race, ethnicity, and empire in US culture have provided some of the most innovative and controversial contributions to recent scholarship. Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature represents a new chapter in the emerging dialogues about the importance of borders on a global scale. This book collects nineteen essays written in the 1990s in this emergent field by both well established and up-and-coming scholars. Almost all the essays have been either especially written for this volume or revised for inclusion here. These essays are accessible, well-focused resources for college and university students and their teachers, displaying both historical depth and theoretical finesse as they attempt close and lively readings. The anthology includes more than one discussion of each literary tradition associated with major racial or ethnic communities. Such a gathering of diverse, complementary, and often competing viewpoints provides a good introduction to the cultural differences and commonalities that comprise the United States today. The volume opens with two essays by the editors: first, a survey of the ideas in the individual pieces, and, second, a long essay that places current debates in US ethnicity and race studies within both the history of American studies as a whole and recent developments in postcolonial theory.Faulkner and Film (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)
Par Peter Lurie, Ann J. Abadie. 2014
Considering that he worked a stint as a screenwriter, it will come as little surprise that Faulkner has often been…
called the most cinematic of novelists. Faulkner's novels were produced in the same high period as the films of classic Hollywood, a reason itself for considering his work alongside this dominant form. Beyond their era, though, Faulkner's novels—or the ways in which they ask readers to see as well as feel his world—have much in common with film. That Faulkner was aware of film and that his novels’ own “thinking” betrays his profound sense of the medium and its effects broadens the contexts in which he can be considered. In a range of approaches, the contributors consider Faulkner’s career as a scenarist and collaborator in Hollywood, the ways his screenplay work and the adaptations of his fiction informed his literary writing, and how Faulkner’s craft anticipates, intersects with, or reflects upon changes in cultural history across the lifespan of cinema. Drawing on film history, critical theory, archival studies of Faulkner's screenplays and scholarship about his work in Hollywood, the nine essays show a keen awareness of literary modernism and its relation to film.Faulkner and Whiteness
Par Jay Watson. 2011
William Faulkner wrote during a tumultuous period in southern racial consciousness, between the years of the enactment of Jim Crow…
and the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the South. Throughout the writer's career, racial paradigms were in flux, and these shifting notions are reflected in Faulkner's prose. Faulkner's fiction contains frequent questions about the ways in which white Americans view themselves with regard to race along with challenges to the racial codes and standards of the region, and complex portrayals of the interactions between blacks and whites. Throughout his work, Faulkner contests white identity—its performance by whites and those passing for white, its role in shaping the South, and its assumption of normative identity in opposition to non-white “Others.” This is true even in novels without a strong visible African American presence, such as As I Lay Dying, The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion. Faulkner and Whiteness explores the ways in which Faulkner's fiction addresses and destabilizes the concept of whiteness in American culture. Collectively, the essays argue that whiteness, as part of the Nobel Laureate's consistent querying of racial dynamics, is a central element. This anthology places Faulkner's oeuvre—and scholarly views of it—in the contexts of its contemporary literature and academic trends exploring race and texts.Christmas Memories from Mississippi
Par Wyatt Waters. 2010
This beautiful book of thirty-eight essays, illustrated by Mississippi's premier watercolorist Wyatt Waters, will ring true with treasured recollections of…
Christmases past. Remember the Christmas it snowed on the Mississippi Coast? Glen Allison recalls that miracle. Richard Ford and Waters tell exactly what they felt when they first laid eyes on a bicycle left under the tree by Santa Claus. These Mississippians celebrate Christmas pageants, the decorating, the family dinners—even as they recognize war and loss as part of our lives and sometimes part of our holidays. Christmas Memories from Mississippi looks at the holidays from the early twentieth century through the present and offers the celebrations from various points of view, both religious and secular. This book makes an ideal memento of shared traditions and lovingly extends the spirit of the season across the state's diversity.Faulkner and the Ecology of the South (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)
Par Joseph R. Urgo. 2005
In 1952, Faulkner noted the exceptional nature of the South when he characterized it as “the only really authentic region…
in the United States, because a deep indestructible bond still exists between man and his environment.” The essays collected in Faulkner and the Ecology of the South explore Faulkner's environmental imagination, seeking what Ann Fisher-Wirth calls the : “ecological counter-melody” of his texts. “Ecology” was not a term in common use outside the sciences in Faulkner's time. However, the word “environment” seems to have held deep meaning for Faulkner. Often he repeated his abiding interest in “man in conflict with himself, with his fellow man, or with his time and place, his environment.” Eco-criticism has led to a renewed interest among literary scholars for what in this volume Cecelia Tichi calls, “humanness within congeries of habitats and environments.” Philip Weinstein draws on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus. Eric Anderson argues that Faulkner's fiction has much to do with ecology in the sense that his work often examines the ways in which human communities interact with the natural world, and François Pitavy sees Faulkner's wilderness as unnatural in the ways it represents reflections of man's longings and frustrations. Throughout these essays, scholars illuminate in fresh ways the precarious ecosystem of Yoknapatawpha County.Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)
Par Doreen Fowler. 1989
In 1944, William Faulkner wrote to Malcolm Cowley, “I'm telling the same story over and over which is myself and…
the world. That's all a writer ever does, he tells his own biography in a thousand different terms.” With these words, Faulkner suggests that what changes in the course of his prolific novel-writing career is not so much the content but the style, “the thousand different terms” of his fiction. The essays in Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction, first presented at the 1987 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi, focus on Faulkner's narrative inventiveness, on how Faulkner, like his character Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, relentlessly kept “trying to say.” The contributors, authorities on Faulkner's narrative, offer a wide variety of critical approaches to Faulkner's fiction-writing process. Cleanth Brooks, for example, applies the strategies of New Criticism to Faulkner's rendering of the heroic and pastoral modes; Judith L. Sensibar attempts to locate biographical sources for repeated Faulknerian paradigms; and Philip M. Weinstein draws on the theories of the Marxist Althusser and the French psychoanalyst Lacan. The topics examined are similarly wide-ranging.