A01=Karl F. Zender
Author_Karl F. Zender
Black culture
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
close reading
critique
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Faulkner Studies
feminism
incest
literary theory
misogyny
new historicism
paternity
patriarchy
post-structuralism
practical criticism
privacy
psychoanalysis
Product details
- ISBN 9780807127612
- Weight: 333g
- Dimensions: 149 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 2002
- Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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With this study Karl F. Zender offers fresh readings of individual novels, themes, and motifs while also assessing the impact of recent politicised interpretations on our understanding of Faulkner's achievement. Sympathetically acknowledging the need to decenter the canon, Zender's searching interrogation of current theory clears a breathing space for Faulkner and his readers between the fustier remnants of New Criticism and the excesses of post-structuralism.
Each chapter opens with a balanced presentation of the genuine gifts contemporary theory has bestowed on our comprehension of a particular novel or problem in Faulkner criticism and then proceeds with a groundbreaking reading. ""The Politics of Incest"" challenges older psychoanalytic interpretations of Faulkner's use of the incest motif, and ""Faulkner's Privacy"" defends the novelist's difficulty or ""reticence"" as an aesthetic resistance against the rude candor of deregionalized and depersonalized culture. Subsequent chapters take up the volatile issues of Faulkner's representations of women and of African Americans, and a close reading of the classic ""Barn Burning"" critiques the current tendency to blur the concepts of patriarchy and paternity.
The elegiac final chapter, ""Where is Yoknapatawpha County?"" draws on a comparison with John Updike's Pennsylvania fiction and a reading of Joan Williams's The Wintering to explore Faulkner's disinclination to represent the quotidian realities of southern life in his later novels. Zender shows that Faulkner's stylistic withdrawal attempts to ""transform into beauty"" his alienation from the postwar world and his fear of aging. That Faulkner and the Politics of Reading itself recovers and gives new luster to Faulkner's beauty will surely please, in the author's words, ""those readers . . . for whom literature is less a mechanism of social change than a source of pleasure."" The originality of its critical vision will inspire Faulkner scholars, students of American literature, and general readers.
Each chapter opens with a balanced presentation of the genuine gifts contemporary theory has bestowed on our comprehension of a particular novel or problem in Faulkner criticism and then proceeds with a groundbreaking reading. ""The Politics of Incest"" challenges older psychoanalytic interpretations of Faulkner's use of the incest motif, and ""Faulkner's Privacy"" defends the novelist's difficulty or ""reticence"" as an aesthetic resistance against the rude candor of deregionalized and depersonalized culture. Subsequent chapters take up the volatile issues of Faulkner's representations of women and of African Americans, and a close reading of the classic ""Barn Burning"" critiques the current tendency to blur the concepts of patriarchy and paternity.
The elegiac final chapter, ""Where is Yoknapatawpha County?"" draws on a comparison with John Updike's Pennsylvania fiction and a reading of Joan Williams's The Wintering to explore Faulkner's disinclination to represent the quotidian realities of southern life in his later novels. Zender shows that Faulkner's stylistic withdrawal attempts to ""transform into beauty"" his alienation from the postwar world and his fear of aging. That Faulkner and the Politics of Reading itself recovers and gives new luster to Faulkner's beauty will surely please, in the author's words, ""those readers . . . for whom literature is less a mechanism of social change than a source of pleasure."" The originality of its critical vision will inspire Faulkner scholars, students of American literature, and general readers.
Karl F. Zender has published extensively on William Faulkner and occasionally on other writers. He is professor of English at the University of California at Davis and the author of The Crossing of the Ways: William Faulkner, the South, and the Modern World.
