Faulkner

A survey of the William Faulkner studies landscape in 2010 shows that the author's "postage stamp of native soil" remains a favorite destination for scholars toting an array of critical baggage. True to form, this body of work serves as a veritable microcosm of broader critical discourses in a range of fields: Faulkner studies, Southern studies, American studies, cultural studies, and globalization studies. One noticeable trend this year is the proliferation of comparative studies. Some of the pairings extend long lines of critical inquiry, bringing Ernest Hemingway or Toni Morrison into contact with Faulkner. Others run along lines less traveled, for example, comparisons of Faulkner's work to that of W. E. B. Du Bois, Kate Chopin, or contemporary writers working in a conspicuously postmodern vein.

i Biography

Faulkner gains a new life in Philip M. Weinstein's Becoming Faulkner: The Art and Life of William Faulkner (Oxford). Weinstein's is a familiar name in Faulkner studies, owing to an impressive body of work over the years, and this provocative study only increases the value of his aggregate contribution. Weinstein purposefully goes against the grain of conventional biographical narratives that transform the "messy authenticity" of a subject's life into a manufactured form that seems "straightened out, time-ordered, false." Countering what he describes as a biographical proclivity to treat the life and the writing as separate threads, Weinstein aims to weave them together by drawing on the conceit of the cultural loom in Absalom, Absalom!: Faulkner's figurative way of casting the arduous task of "becoming" as a struggle against powerful cultural forces that breed doubts in the individual life about the purpose and meaning of the human condition. Faulkner's cultural loom raises the demoralizing prospect that life "can't matter," and yet, as Weinstein observes, the author devoted himself to fiction with a vigor suggesting that his life of writing "must matter." The dialectical tension between these two poles drives Weinstein's acute analysis. Eschewing chronological structure, Weinstein adopts a thematic approach in crafting five chapters, each of which delivers on the promise to intertwine the life and the writing. A case in point is his brilliant exploration of the stress and anxieties shared by Faulkner and one of his most enduring fictional creations: the Compsons of Yoknapatawpha. In this instance, as in numerous others in this richly rewarding study, Weinstein sheds light on Faulkner's sustained project of "becoming" as a matter of his life and his life's work unfolding with mutually constitutive outcomes.

ii Bibliography, Editions, Manuscripts

As I Lay Dying appears as part of the Norton Critical Edition series. This edition, edited by Michael Gorra, is based on the corrected text as established by Noel Polk in 1985 and includes supplementary material in the sections "Backgrounds and Contexts," "Contemporary Reception," "Cultural Context," "The Writer and His Work," and "Criticism." This last section features a diverse selection of essays that have become staples of criticism on Faulkner's fifth novel. This volume will likely be a valuable scholarly and pedagogical resource.

iii General Criticism

Surely the marquee event of the year in Faulkner scholarship is the publication of Sally Wolff's Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an Antebellum Plantation Diary (LSU). While planning the annual literary pilgrimage to Faulkner country for students at Emory University, Wolff came into contact with Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, an Emory alumnus living in Atlanta and hailing from Holly Springs, Mississippi. As Wolff explains, Francisco responded to an e-mail inviting alumni in the Atlanta area to join the literary pilgrimage with a laconic but intriguing reply: "I can't go on the trip, but I knew William Faulkner." Wolff arranged to interview Francisco, whose father was a good friend of Faulkner's in childhood and early adulthood. In the course of the interview Francisco mentioned that Faulkner would come to the family home in the late 1930s and pore over the diaries of Francis Terry Leak, a Francisco ancestor who owned a plantation in northern Mississippi during the antebellum period. As it happens, "The Diary of Frances Terry Leak" had been available...