Faulkner's Questioning Narratives

by Minter, David L.

• ISBN13: 9780252071935
• ISBN10: 025207193X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-01-01
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

Focusing on the core novels, including The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Sanctuary, Light in August 2003, and Go Down, Moses, David Minter illuminates Faulkner's mature fiction: the tensions at play within the fiction and the creativity not only exhibited by the author but also extended to his characters and required of his readers.Faulkner's achievement, Minter contends, was in combining daring experiments in form with searching examinations of grave social, political, and moral problems. His novels change and expand the role of the reader by means of proliferating narratives that lead to questions rather than answers and to approximation rather than resolution. Minter shows how this process at times implicates the reader in the corruption and violence of the story, as when the reader is required to fill in--out of his or her own experience--the crucial gaps left in the narrative of Sanctuary.Positioning Faulkner on the cusp between modernist and postmodernist writing, Minter shows how his methods undercut the self-contained exclusivity of the New Criticism by integrating the world of the novel with the reader's experience of history and culture.

Author Biography

David Minter is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
1. The Force of Faulkner's Fiction: An Introduction	1	(13)
2. "Carcassonne," "Wash," and the Voices of Faulkner's Fiction	14	(25)
3. Faulkner, Childhood, and the Making of The Sound and the Fury: Love, Death, and the Novel	39	(16)
4. "Truths More Intense Than Knowledge": Notes on Faulkner and Creativity	55	(16)
5. Family, Region, and Myth in Faulkner's Fiction	71	(15)
6. A Brief Encounter with the Stories and Tensions That Define Light in August	86	(10)
7. "Monk" as a Guide to One Aspect of the Enduring Force of Absalom, Absalom!	96	(7)
8. "Shapes of Ceremonial Mortality": An Encounter with the Aggressive Violence of Sanctuary	103	(10)
9. The Strange Double-Edged Gift of Faulkner's Fiction	113	(16)
10. Faulkner's Imagination and the Logic of Reiteration: The Case of "The Old People"	129	(15)
11. In Lieu of Conclusion: The Voices of Faulkner's Fiction-Evocation, Celebration, and Revision	144	(9)
Selected Bibliography	153	(10)
Index	163