Faulkner and the Politics of Reading

<p>With this study Karl F. Zender offers fresh readings of individual novels themes and motifs while also assessing the impact of recent politicized interpretations on our understanding of Faulkner's achievement. Sympathetically acknowledging the need to decenter the canon Zender's searching interrogation of current theory clears a breathing space for Faulkner and his readers between the fustier remnants of New Criticism and the excesses of post-structuralism. <p/>Each chapter opens with a balanced presentation of the genuine gifts contemporary theory has bestowed on our comprehension of a particular novel or problem in Faulkner criticism and then proceeds with a groundbreaking reading. The Politics of Incest challenges older psychoanalytic interpretations of Faulkner's use of the incest motif and Faulkner's Privacy defends the novelist's difficulty or reticence as an aesthetic resistance against the rude candor of deregionalized and depersonalized culture. Subsequent chapters take up the volatile issues of Faulkner's representations of women and of African Americans and a close reading of the classic Barn Burning critiques the current tendency to blur the concepts of patriarchy and paternity. <p/>The elegiac final chapter Where is Yoknapatawpha County? draws on a comparison with John Updike's Pennsylvania fiction and a reading of Joan Williams's <i>The Wintering</i> to explore Faulkner's disinclination to represent the quotidian realities of southern life in his later novels. Zender shows that Faulkner's stylistic withdrawal attempts to transform into beauty his alienation from the postwar world and his fear of aging. That <i>Faulkner and the Politics of Reading</i> itself recovers and gives new luster to Faulkner's beauty will surely please in the author's words those readers . . . for whom literature is less a mechanism of social change than a source of pleasure. The originality of its critical vision will inspire Faulkner scholars students of American literature and general readers.</p>