Faulkner

This year finds relatively fewer publications on William Faulkner (the calm before a storm of output in 2019, as forecast by press announcements). A significant amount of scholarship has a retro flavor, with a new collection reading Faulkner in relation to Ernest Hemingway and a pair of articles engaging in comparative formalist readings of Faulkner texts and those of other writers. In a different direction, articles that focus on material and nonhuman entities make their mark. Quantitative scholarship continues to appear, with the year's lone monograph undertaking a pedagogical analysis of Faulkner's status in an international context. Faulkner's fiction studied in light of theories of social networking captures the attention of a major scholar who continues to produce powerful commentary.

i Biography

Kirk Curnutt's simply titled William Faulkner, part of Reaktion's Critical Lives series (Reaktion), packs a tremendous amount of detail into 196 pages, presenting a distinct portrait of a working Faulkner rather than a romanticized one. Opening with a reference to Robert Coughlan's early study of Faulkner in Life magazine, Curnutt explains that instead of following Coughlan's struggle to understand the "man behind the myth," he wants to learn "how the man created the myth." Curnutt takes full advantage of Judith L. Sensibar's Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Life (2009) and cultural materialist approaches by various scholars in order to provide a portrait of the writer building his career under multiple influences, from the expected great-grandfather influence to the more recently discussed debt to Anita Loos. Extensive recent work on Faulkner's screenwriting career identifies more nuance in that aspect of Faulkner's life than Curnutt acknowledges, but his biography offers rich detail in concise form, contextualizing Faulkner as a laborer in words, largely using his personality as a way to illuminate that labor. For example, Curnutt pays close attention to sales numbers and income from books as well as the payments for stories and Hollywood studio work. He also keeps a running commentary on Faulkner's alcoholism because scholars "have barely begun to reckon with alcoholism's effect on [Faulkner's] prose." Curnutt shows an aptitude for explaining or framing moments and aspects of Faulkner's life in ways that uniquely depart from other books of this type and even from "serious" previous biographies. Examples include delineating Estelle Oldham Faulkner's and Phil Stone's equally important though divergent impacts on Faulkner's writing early on, labeling Intruder in the Dust a "B-movie" and pointing out that Faulkner's writing As I Lay Dying while working in the university power plant illustrates a moment of living two parallel lives. The first point represents an original reading, and Curnutt differs from standard Faulkner biography by cutting Faulkner's father some slack, writing that he "at the very least was more complicated than the hollow man history remembers him as." While most of these reframings are minor, they raise the book above the level of a merely serviceable rehashing of Faulkner's life story. Along the way Curnutt discusses Faulkner's novels and stories, both major and minor. For teachers and readers looking for an up-to-date, concise biography that is both compact and strikingly illuminating, this little book is a solid choice. It would be especially useful in graduate or undergraduate courses.

ii Monographs

Koichi Fujino's Studying and Teaching W. C. Falkner, William Faulkner, and Digital Literacy: Personal Democracy in Social Combination (Lexington) opens with the question, "How do we study and teach the literature of the American South with ESL (English as a Second Language) students in today's digital environments?" Fujino's answer to this question wends through an argument grounded in pedagogy as well as literary theory and digital specificities. The key term for Fujino is social combination, which he defines as "two or three people's temporal connections to redeem and reinvigorate the egalitarian spirit that has been threatened by modern society's imperial impulse," and which he presents as "a model of personal relationship in today's globalized world," a way to envision dialogue across cultures, languages, and digital platforms...