Faulkner

This has been an active year in William Faulkner scholarship, with four major book-length collections of articles, two issues of the Faulkner Journal, several Faulkner-focused sections of other major journals, and a variety of other book- and article-length treatments. A significant majority of these consider Faulkner alongside a specific contextual category—Faulkner and his geographies, Faulkner and the funeral industry, and Faulkner and the media, to name just a few. Two particular pairings stand out, both for the frequency with which they appear and for their continued prominence over the past few years. The first is Faulkner and film. This year's contributions add an expanded emphasis on the wider "media ecology," adding new depth to Faulkner's relationship to the changing media landscape. The second is Faulkner and the global South. By considering Faulkner and geography more widely, several of this year's contributions allow readers to consider the global South in wider and more complex terms.

i Books: General Contexts

This year saw the release of two collections of essays edited by John T. Matthews. The first of these (The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner) presents Faulkner in conversation with a number of critical contexts, specifically ones that have received extensive critical treatment since the publication of the first Cambridge Companion in 1995. As such, this latest volume serves as a useful barometer of the major trends in Faulkner criticism over the last two decades and suggests possible avenues for continued work in the field. Two specific contexts stand out: Faulkner's relations to transnational studies and to material culture. In the first essay, Julian Murphet explores the connection to material culture ("New Media Ecology," pp. 14–28). Specifically, Murphet compares the writings of Honoré de Balzac and Faulkner, contending that new technology is the key difference between the imaginative worlds the two create. Faulkner, Murphet argues, creates space for literature in the midst of new media ecology by focusing on literature's power "to say a great deal about nothing at all, about what does not happen, what cannot be sensed, what has no place in the streamlined cognitive cartography of the present." Faulkner is able to do this by using narrative techniques that freeze time and that experiment with the disembodied voice.

In "History's Dark Markings: Faulkner and Film's Racial Representation" (pp. 29–43) Peter Lurie continues the exploration of Faulkner in relation to changing media culture, comparing the portrayal of race in Faulkner and in early films, particularly those of D. W. Griffith. Film, Lurie argues, emphasizes the visible "markedness" of racial difference. In both The Birth of a Nation and The Jazz Singer, "performers' 'blacking up' allowed audiences to project stereotypical behavior on a non-white Other." Faulkner's fiction similarly concentrates on how race is seen. For instance, Joe Christmas in Light in August is described as a photo negative, a physical manifestation of blackness. Lurie concludes that the main difference between Faulkner and Griffith is that Faulkner is intentionally challenging racial categories rather than trying to erase them. Similarly, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman considers racial visibility, resituating Absalom, Absalom! as Jim Bond's origin story ("'What Moves at the Margin': William Faulkner and Race," pp. 44–58). Quentin, according to Lurie, attempts and fails to re-form the Southern white masculinity that was destroyed in the Civil War. Jim Bond is the alternative: "Embodying black sound and movement, he exists in the novel as the emblem of what might be, or as the invocation of the possible." Faulkner's embodiment, then, deepens ongoing conversations about race and material culture.

The next two essays put Faulkner's fiction in conversation with ecology. In "Faulkner and Biopolitics" (pp. 59–73) Patricia E. Chu argues that Faulkner should be read not just as a regional author but as a part of the larger Anglo-American modernist movement, particularly in his portrayal of biopolitics. Modernists are concerned with a new biological understanding that sees life in component parts separate from the entity as a whole, which is often manifested as an anxiety in their writing. This anxiety is evident in Faulkner...