What Is "New" in Faulkner Criticism?

• Published in: Polish Journal for American Studies Vol. 12; pp. 225 - 235
• Main Author: Maszewski, Zbigniew
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Warsaw University of Warsaw 01.04.2018
• Subjects: American literature; Architects; Creativity; Critics; Faulkner, William (1897-1962); Feminism; Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961); Internet; Modernism; Nobel prizes; Politics; Semiotics; Stereotypes; Welty, Eudora (1909-2001); Writers; Writing
• ISSN: 1733-9154; 2544-8781

Drawing on feminist criticism, most notably Kristeva's, Deborah Clarke's Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner (1994) proposes that central to a new understanding of the role of Faulkner's women characters is "the transformative power of the mother," Faulkner's ability to disrupt stereotypical, cultural constructs by "dissolving boundaries between self and other, semiotic and symbolic" (qtd. in Hagood 92-93). [...]Faulkner's somewhat offhand remark "if a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate" acquires in itself a strongly symbolic status, but one that expresses his desire (repressed/ criminal?) to take over the "literal creative power" of the mother as a physical body rather than an object of idealization. According to Richard Godden's Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South's Long Revolution (1997), Faulkner's work is "best understood" through an analysis of a historically and racially determined "labor trauma," a change in the patterns of interdependency between the white landowner and the black slave and sharecropper, a change defined by Godden as "a primal scene of recognition during which white passes into black and black passes into white along perpetual tracks necessitated by a singular and pervasively coercive system of production" (qtd. in Hagood 104). [...]Hagood acknowledges the role of digital platforms in giving unprecedented access to Faulkner's texts and texts on Faulkner, allowing the internet users to catalogue and order as well as to see unexpected patterns and hidden connections. [...]an experience can no longer be "innocent" (see Karl Zender's Faulkner and the Politics of Reading, 2002), but it is a kind of response which regains the power of immediacy.