Faulkner in America

by Urgo, Joseph R.

• ISBN13: 9781578063765
• ISBN10: 1578063760
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-11-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi

Summary

With essays by Richard Godden, Catherine Gunther Kodat, Kathryn B. McKee, Peter Nicolaison, Charles A. Peek, Noel Polk, Hortense J. Spillers, Joseph R. Urgo, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Charles Reagan WilsonWilliam Faulkner is Mississippi's most famous author and arguably one of the country's greatest writers. But what was his relationship with America? How did he view the nation, its traditions, its issues?In ten essays from the 1998 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held at the University of Mississippi,Faulkner in Americalooks closely at the exchange between William Faulkner the writer and his national affiliation. Collectively, the essays ask which American ideas, identities, and conflicts we should associate with Mississippi's Nobel Laureate.The collection explores questions regarding Faulkner's place in American literature, his standing and esteem in literary studies, and his relation to the United States. To address such issues, the writers seek a definition of the phrase "Faulkner in America."One difficulty scholars wrestle with is how to deal with Mississippi's place in the union. Surely, Faulkner mused: Is Mississippi in America? When he thought about America, he thought about being left alone, about maintaining his distance.Essays in this volume look at Faulkner's views on the "greening of American history," on American figures such as Thomas Jefferson, on women in American letters, and on the American dream.Authors find that the conceptually invigorating signification of the phrase "Faulkner in America" is, finally, provisional. Foremost in Faulkner's mind, in interviews as well as in the aesthetics of the apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County, is that whoever and whatever is in America arrived by battles won and lost, by emigration and enslavement, by choice and by compulsion.Faulkner in Americaoccasions a rigorous examination of Faulkner's American century.Joseph R. Urgo is chair of the English department at the University of Mississippi. His books includeFaulkner's Apocrypha,Novel Frames: Literature as Guide to Race, Sex, and History in American Culture, andIn the Age of Distraction, all published by University Press of Mississippi.Ann J. Abadie is associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. She has co-editedFaulkner in Cultural Context,Faulkner and the Natural WorldandFaulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect, among other Faulkner volumes, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

Author Biography

Joseph R. Urgo is chair of the English department at the University of Mississippi Ann J. Abadie is associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
Joseph R. Urgo
A Note on the Conference	xxix
Comparative Idiocy: A Phenomenological Reading of The Hamlet as a Rebuke to an American Century	1	(23)
Richard Godden
Faulkner Adds Up: Reading Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury	24	(21)
Hortense J. Spillers
``The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives'': Faulkner and the Greening of American History	45	(19)
Noel Polk
William Faulkner's Dialogue with Thomas Jefferson	64	(18)
Peter Nicolaisen
Writing A Fable for America	82	(16)
Catherine Gunther Kodat
Where Was that Bird? Thinking America through Faulkner	98	(18)
Joseph R. Urgo
``A-laying there, right up to my door'': As American As I Lay Dying	116	(20)
Charles A. Peek
Go Down, Moses: Faulkner's Interrogation of the American Dream	136	(17)
Linda Wagner-Martin
Our Land, Our Country: Faulkner, the South, and the American Way of Life	153	(14)
Charles Reagan Wilson
The Portable Eclipse: Hawthorne, Faulkner, and Scribbling Women	167	(20)
Kathryn B. Mckee
Contributors	187	(2)
Index	189