Faulkner

Three trends continue. First, the influence of "the global south," the study of the American South in comparison to other "souths" and in an international context, is making its mark in Faulkner studies. Second, critics interested in trauma theory are finding a rich mine of examples in Faulkner. Third, studies of individual novels are declining in favor of work that takes into account more than one text, as is evident by the length of the section on general criticism.

i Biography

Jay Parini's One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner (HarperCollins) is written, according to the preface, "for the general reader" and is true to its purpose, distilled from existing biographies, from interviews with principals such as Jill Faulkner Summers and Elaine Steinbeck, and from the views of a select (and far from representative) group of critics. It also reminds us of how desperately we need an intellectual biography. The most troubling aspect of this one is that it rehearses a number of views currently under dramatic revision, such as the value of the later work, and touches inadequately on revisionist biographical facts, such as Faulkner's apparent ease with homosexuality. Parini is certainly adept at selecting lumber from the forests available to him in the more massive, preceding biographies by Joseph Blotner, Frederick R. Karl, Richard Gray, and others. The image of Faulkner traipsing through Italy, for example, lugging a heavy typewriter and hundreds of blank sheets of paper, evidence of his "commitment to keep his writing career going apace," is, as Parini says, "rather startling." Nonetheless, the biography is driven by no distinct biographical vision—and is likely to erupt into comments such as "what this means to the biographer" or other self-referential queries—and by no sense of Faulkner's intellectual or aesthetic contribution, and it is finally more a celebrity story, falling into a rags-to-riches formula. "The mystery of the man cannot be 'solved,' " Parini concludes, echoing Blotner's conclusion about Faulkner's genius, echoing Faulkner's own sense of wonder at those voices he heard, which forever demand something more.

ii Bibliography, Editions, Manuscripts

Koichi Suwabe, A Faulkner Bibliography (Center for Studies in American Culture, SUNY-Buffalo), rightfully laments the poor scholarship practiced by those who apply "new" methods to Faulkner while being "not very familiar with the rich heritage" of criticism dating back to the 1940s. An incomplete listing intended to supplement existing bibliographies, Suwabe's is "reflective of my concern with the current situation in Faulkner studies."

iii General Criticism

The major event this year is A Companion to Faulkner Studies, ed. Charles A. Peek and Robert W. Hamblin (Greenwood), which meets a desperate need to provide scholars, especially those embarking on careers in Faulkner studies, with a road map to past criticism. Each of the 13 chapters surveys a subfield in Faulkner criticism with remarkable consistency in quality, rigor, and depth. Chapters open with theoretical underpinnings and move on to survey notable criticism that applies the approach to Faulkner. Hamblin's "Mythic and Archetypal Criticism" (pp. 1–26) sets the bar high, identifying the persistence of this methodology with the Yoknapatawpha project, "only secondarily a mirror of objective reality; it is first and foremost an imaginary process, a fleshing out of the artist's genius and inner vision." Theresa Towner, "Historical Criticism" (pp. 27–46), examines the primary events that shaped "the historical landscape in Faulkner's lifetime" before moving on to critical commentary on Faulkner's representation of history and on three of the most salient cultural constructs identified by historicists: race, ethnicity, and the wilderness. D. Matthew Ramsey, "Formalist Criticism" (pp. 47–64), begins with New Criticism; moves on to structuralism, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and narratology; and ends with Bakhtin and dialogics, tracing the trajectory of formalism's attraction to what Ramsey calls "the power of the sentence" in Faulkner. "Almost everything becomes connected to biography," claims Kevin Railey in "Biographical Criticism" (pp. 65–96), an invaluable survey of the succession of Faulkner biographies and biographically based studies of his work. Debrah Raschke, "Modernist Criticism" (pp. 99–124), identifies the sense of "epistemological loss," studies...