Project MUSE®: The Faulkner Journal - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/735
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Faulkner Journal.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 21 (2005/2006) through current issue
Latest Articles: The Faulkner JournalTWOProject MUSE®The Faulkner Journal2640-17030884-2949Latest articles in The Faulkner Journal. Feed provided by Project MUSE®From the Coeditors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983643
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When we assumed the role of coeditors of The Faulkner Journal, we articulated our commitment to expanding, diversifying, and broadening the scope of Faulkner studies, as well as our desire to bring the journal into deep conversation with ongoing social and cultural issues. To that end, beginning in issue 35.2 and continuing forward, TFJ will publish occasional conference proceedings, public talks, and other pieces that further our readers' engagement with Faulkner studies.As we uphold the journal's tradition of publishing exceptional peer reviewed scholarship and book reviews, we believe that including material from diverse venues enables us to broaden the journal's scope, impact, and usefulness.Send suggestions to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/735/image/coversmallFrom the Coeditors2026-02-24text/htmlen-USFrom the Coeditors2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®19362026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24Race, Crime, and the South: Go Down, Moses and Beyond
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983644
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"Oh, I wish I'd come over here once in a while. That was a crime! That was a crime! Who's going to punish that?""On frosty nights the humane negro prowler would warm the end of a plank and put it up under the cold claws of chickens roosting in a tree; a drowsy hen would step onto the comfortable board, softly clucking her gratitude and the prowler would dump her into his bag, and later into his stomach, perfectly sure that in taking this trifle from the man who daily robbed him of an inestimable treasure—his liberty—he was not committing any sin that God would remember against him in the Last Great Day."Who defines crime, and how is it raced? These two epigraphs both extend and undercut the notion of crime. In the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/735/image/coversmallRace, Crime, and the South: Go Down, Moses and Beyond2026-02-24text/htmlen-USRace, Crime, and the South: Go Down, Moses and Beyond2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®872682026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24The Fall and Fall of the Bundren Family
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983645
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Sometimes verbs come in pairs, inchoative and causative. If you want to describe something that seems to change its state spontaneously, you pick the inchoative; if you want to name an agent, you use the causative. Newcomers to the linguistic study of inchoatives and causatives will hear, early in their education, that people die (inchoative); diseases or animals or other people may kill them (causative). But perhaps the first thing one learns is that some words pivot both ways. The invariable first example of "alternating inchoatives and causatives" is break: things break; people break things.In some languages, inchoatives and causatives are distinguished by phonemes. I first read about four instances of that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/735/image/coversmallThe Fall and Fall of the Bundren Family2026-02-24text/htmlen-USThe Fall and Fall of the Bundren Family2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®657872026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24"The dying summer": Menopause in Light in August
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983646
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According to André Bleikasten, in the spring of 1932, William Faulkner's wife, Estelle, threw the nearly completed manuscript of Light in August out of the car window, forcing Faulkner to go back and pick up the pages from the weeds along the roadside (William Faulkner 209). We cannot be certain what triggered Estelle's "fit of rage," but it might have been the persistent misogyny in the novel (209). Doc Hines's refrain "Bitchery and abomination!" typifies the antiwomanist rhetoric that has made many readers and critics uncomfortable (370). Doreen Fowler observes, "Of all Faulkner's novels, none seems more disparaging of women than Light in August, and, of all Faulkner's characters, possibly none is more
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/735/image/coversmall"The dying summer": Menopause in Light in August2026-02-24text/htmlen-US"The dying summer": Menopause in Light in August2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®727612026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24After Seventy Years: Reconsidering Faulkner's Visit to Japan in Historical Context
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983647
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In 1955, Faulkner came to Japan as the first stop of a long trip planned by the U.S. State Department that would take him to Japan, the Philippines, Italy, France, Germany, Britain, and Iceland. During his stay, he gave interviews at press conferences and talked with numerous academics and writers, mainly in Tokyo, Nagano, and Kyoto. His visit resulted in two important essays: "Impressions of Japan," which was used as the script of the United States Information Service (USIS) movie of the same title, and "To the Youth of Japan," which was widely distributed in Japan. The latter especially influenced those who were struggling to see Japan's future through the lingering fog of war and amid the rapidly shifting
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/735/image/coversmallAfter Seventy Years: Reconsidering Faulkner's Visit to Japan in Historical Context2026-02-24text/htmlen-USAfter Seventy Years: Reconsidering Faulkner's Visit to Japan in Historical Context2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®194532026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24The South / Defeat / Japan: Faulkner's Visit to Japan and the Institutionalization of American Literature in Japan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983648
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When Faulkner visited Japan, he penned the essay "To the Youth of Japan." There he explicitly linked the South's defeat in the Civil War and Japan's defeat in World War II, offering advice to the youth of Japan from the position of a paternal elder who had experienced a similar defeat. But Faulkner was not the first to make these connections. Two years earlier, in 1953, historian of the US South, C. Vann Woodward, had already covered those bases when invited to lecture in history at the Tokyo–Stanford American Studies Seminars held in Tokyo. That was the same year as the publication of Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs's Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South, which included Woodward's 1952
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/735/image/coversmallThe South / Defeat / Japan: Faulkner's Visit to Japan and the Institutionalization of American Literature in Japan2026-02-24text/htmlen-USThe South / Defeat / Japan: Faulkner's Visit to Japan and the Institutionalization of American Literature in Japan2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®175852026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24William Faulkner, Day by Day in Japan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983649
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From 1–23 August 1955, William Faulkner visited Japan under the auspices of the U.S. State Department's Exchange of Persons Program of the United States Information Service (USIS). It was his first visit to Japan, though his wife, Estelle, had visited Japan before. In November 1950, a Japanese writer, Fumiko Komatsu, arrived in Oxford, Mississippi. She called Rowan Oak directly to arrange a meeting with Faulkner and managed to secure one. The content of the interview is recorded in her interview report. In it, she states: "To my surprise, Mrs. Faulkner knew Kyoto and Nara. She told me that she had spent 14 years of her first marriage in Shanghai, and that she had visited Japan during that time. I told her that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/735/image/coversmallWilliam Faulkner, Day by Day in Japan2026-02-24text/htmlen-USWilliam Faulkner, Day by Day in Japan2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®244372026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24On the Wide-Open Space of the Paper: William Faulkner and the Language Arena of the Cultural Cold War
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983650
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In August 1955, when a series of literary seminars (known as the Nagano Seminar) was organized around Nobel Prize–winning author William Faulkner, its participants gathered to write on kakejiku, a traditional Japanese hanging scroll now archived and on display at the Nagano Municipal Library. Among the various messages under the banner title of "To Mr. Faulkner Nagano Seminar 1955," one inscribed by Kwansei University's Higashiyama Masayoshi stands out. Unlike the more diplomatic expressions written by Kyushu University's Takuwa Shinji in his reference to Faulkner's character—"You are more generous than we expected"—or Waseda University's Saitō Kazue's allusion—"Seven Pillars of wisdom you are!"—that compares
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/735/image/coversmallOn the Wide-Open Space of the Paper: William Faulkner and the Language Arena of the Cultural Cold War2026-02-24text/htmlen-USOn the Wide-Open Space of the Paper: William Faulkner and the Language Arena of the Cultural Cold War2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®121732026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24Faulkner, Aviation, and Modern War by Michael Zeitlin (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983651
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William Faulkner "was a member of the RAF in 1918" (149). In 1946, Faulkner asked Malcolm Cowley to use this specific sentence to describe his involvement in the First World War in place of the more embellished stories that he had personally promulgated in the past. For much of his career, Faulkner blatantly lied about his military service. He claimed that he served in the Royal Air Force, sometimes exaggerating the story to state that he had flown in combat, crash-landed upside down in a barn, and been wounded. He occasionally affected a limp and sometimes referred speciously to a metal plate in his head. He also wore an officer's uniform with flight wings and overseas stripes when he returned to Mississippi at
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/735/image/coversmallFaulkner, Aviation, and Modern War by Michael Zeitlin (review)2026-02-24text/htmlen-USFaulkner, Aviation, and Modern War by Michael Zeitlin (review)2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®200812026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24Faulkner and Slavery ed. by Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr. (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983652
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Faulkner and Slavery was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2021. This compact volume, described on its back cover as "the first collection to address the myriad legacies of African chattel slavery in the writings and personal history [of William Faulkner]," stands out for the variety of themes covered, the relevance of its content, and the judicious editorial decisions made by Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr., which make this volume coherent and powerful. The book explores the issue of slavery from various perspectives, including economic, historical, architectural, musical, and literary angles, making it a rich and timely contribution. Its importance is heightened by being the first collection
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/735/image/coversmallFaulkner and Slavery ed. by Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr. (review)2026-02-24text/htmlen-USFaulkner and Slavery ed. by Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr. (review)2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®381772026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24