Faulknerista

Faulknerista PDF Author: Catherine G. Kodat
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080717923X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Faulknerista collects more than twenty years of critically influential scholarship by Catherine Gunther Kodat on the writings of one of the most important American authors of the twentieth century, William Faulkner. Initially composed as freestanding essays and now updated and revised, the book’s nine chapters place Faulkner’s work in the context of current debates concerning the politics of white authors who write about race, queer sexualities, and the use of the N-word in literature and popular culture. The Faulknerista of the title is a critic who tackles these debates without fear or favor, balancing admiration with skepticism in a manner that establishes a new model for single-author scholarship that is both historically grounded (for women have been writing about Faulkner, and talking back to him, since the beginning of his career) and urgently contemporary. Beginning with an introduction that argues for the critical importance of women’s engagement with Faulkner’s fiction, through comparative discussions pairing it with works by Toni Morrison, Jean-Luc Godard, Quentin Tarantino, and David Simon, Faulknerista offers a valuable resource for students, scholars, and general readers, written in an accessible style and aimed at stimulating discussions of Faulkner’s work and the rich interpretive challenges it continues to present.

Faulknerista

Faulknerista PDF Author: Catherine G. Kodat
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080717923X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description
Faulknerista collects more than twenty years of critically influential scholarship by Catherine Gunther Kodat on the writings of one of the most important American authors of the twentieth century, William Faulkner. Initially composed as freestanding essays and now updated and revised, the book’s nine chapters place Faulkner’s work in the context of current debates concerning the politics of white authors who write about race, queer sexualities, and the use of the N-word in literature and popular culture. The Faulknerista of the title is a critic who tackles these debates without fear or favor, balancing admiration with skepticism in a manner that establishes a new model for single-author scholarship that is both historically grounded (for women have been writing about Faulkner, and talking back to him, since the beginning of his career) and urgently contemporary. Beginning with an introduction that argues for the critical importance of women’s engagement with Faulkner’s fiction, through comparative discussions pairing it with works by Toni Morrison, Jean-Luc Godard, Quentin Tarantino, and David Simon, Faulknerista offers a valuable resource for students, scholars, and general readers, written in an accessible style and aimed at stimulating discussions of Faulkner’s work and the rich interpretive challenges it continues to present.

Faulknerista

Faulknerista PDF Author: Catherine G. Kodat
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807179248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Faulknerista collects more than twenty years of critically influential scholarship by Catherine Gunther Kodat on the writings of one of the most important American authors of the twentieth century, William Faulkner. Initially composed as freestanding essays and now updated and revised, the book’s nine chapters place Faulkner’s work in the context of current debates concerning the politics of white authors who write about race, queer sexualities, and the use of the N-word in literature and popular culture. The Faulknerista of the title is a critic who tackles these debates without fear or favor, balancing admiration with skepticism in a manner that establishes a new model for single-author scholarship that is both historically grounded (for women have been writing about Faulkner, and talking back to him, since the beginning of his career) and urgently contemporary. Beginning with an introduction that argues for the critical importance of women’s engagement with Faulkner’s fiction, through comparative discussions pairing it with works by Toni Morrison, Jean-Luc Godard, Quentin Tarantino, and David Simon, Faulknerista offers a valuable resource for students, scholars, and general readers, written in an accessible style and aimed at stimulating discussions of Faulkner’s work and the rich interpretive challenges it continues to present.

Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture

Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture PDF Author: Charles Hannon
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807143685
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Throughout his career, William Faulkner produced a literary discourse remarkably contiguous with other discourses of American culture, but seldom has his work been explored as a participant in the shifts and ruptures that characterize modern discursive systems. Charles Hannon argues in his brilliant new study that the language of Faulkner's fiction is replete with the voiced conflicts that shaped America and the South from the 1920s to1950. Specifically, Hannon takes five contemporary debates -- in historiography, law, labor, ethnography, and film -- and relates them both to canonical and less-discussed texts of Faulkner. Hannon employs a theoretical middle ground between Michael Bakhtin's stylistics of the novel and Michel Foucault's model of discourse as an autonomous self-regulated domain, while also drawing from the vast critical literature on Faulkner's fiction. He begins by linking the story cycle The Unvanquished to the battle over interpretations of American history as voiced by the Nashville Agrarians on the one hand and W. E. B. DuBois on the other. Next Hannon shows how Faulkner's detective fiction of the early 1930s and portions of his novel The Hamlet were affected by the emerging schism between adherents of a new school of legal realism and those bound to a more conservative formalist jurisprudence. According to Hannon, Faulkner's great novel Absalom, Absalom! reflects in its depiction of various forms of labor one of Franklin Roosevelt's major New Deal accomplishments -- the Wagner Act of 1935 -- as well as contract disputes in the agricultural and manufacturing South and in the film studios of Hollywood. Hannon discusses Faulkner's experimentation in The Hamlet vis-á-vis the development of the ethnographic method in the field of anthropology. He concludes with a fascinating analysis of the filming of Intruder in the Dust in Faulkner's hometown of Oxford, Mississippi. Through Hannon's keen interpretive readings, Faulkner's texts emerge as a complex "node" in the larger discursive conflicts of his time. Though he often seemed to be detached from influence, Faulkner was, Hannon reveals, intensely attentive to ideas at the fore.

The Complete Works of Kate Chopin

The Complete Works of Kate Chopin PDF Author: Kate Chopin
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807149608
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1034

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Book Description
In 1969, Per Seyersted gave the world the first collected works of Kate Chopin. Seyersted's presentation of Chopin's writings and biographical and bibliographical information led to the rediscovery and celebration of this turn-of-the-century author. Newsweek hailed the two-volume opus -- "In story after story and in all her novels, Kate Chopin's oracular feminism and prophetic psychology almost outweigh her estimable literary talents. Her revival is both interesting and timely." Now for the first time, Seyersted'sComplete Works is available in a single-volume paperback. It is the first and only paperback edition of Chopin's total oeuvre. Containing twenty poems, ninety-six stories, two novels, and thirteen essays -- in short, everything Chopin wrote except several additional poems and three unfinished children's stories -- as well as Seyersted's original revelatory introduction and Edmund Wilson's foreword, this anthology is both a historical and a literary achievement. It is ideal for anyone who wishes to explore the pleasures of reading this highly acclaimed author.

The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction

The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction PDF Author: Martyn Bone
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807130537
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
For generations, southern novelists and critics have grappled with a concept that is widely seen as a trademark of their literature: a strong attachment to geography, or a "sense of place." In the 1930s, the Agrarians accorded special meaning to rural life, particularly the farm, in their definitions of southern identity. For them, the South seemed an organic and rooted region in contrast to the North, where real estate development and urban sprawl evoked a faceless, raw capitalism. By the end of the twentieth century, however, economic and social forces had converged to create a modernized South. How have writers responded to this phenomenon? Is there still a sense of place in the South, or perhaps a distinctly postsouthern sense of place? Martyn Bone innovatively draws upon postmodern thinking to consider the various perspectives that southern writers have brought to the concept of "place" and to look at its fate in a national and global context. He begins with a revisionist assessment of the Agrarians, who failed in their attempts to turn their proprietary ideal of the small farm into actual policy but whose broader rural aesthetic lived on in the work of neo-Agrarian writers, including William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. By the 1950s, adherence to this aesthetic was causing southern writers and critics to lose sight of the social reality of a changing South. Bone turns to more recent works that do respond to the impact of capitalist spatial development on the South -- and on the nation generally -- including that self-declared "international city" Atlanta. Close readings of novels by Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Anne Rivers Siddons, Tom Wolfe, and Toni Cade Bambara illuminate evolving ideas about capital, land, labor, and class while introducing southern literary studies into wider debates around social, cultural, and literary geography. Bone concludes his remarkably rich book by considering works of Harry Crews and Barbara Kingsolver that suggest the southern sense of place may be not only post-Agrarian or postsouthern but also transnational.

Form and Fable in American Fiction

Form and Fable in American Fiction PDF Author: Daniel Hoffman
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813915258
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Combining the disciplines of folklore and literary criticism in his perceptive readings of works by Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain, Daniel Hoffman demonstrates how these authors transformed materials from both high and popular culture, from their European past and their American present, in works that helped to form our national consciousness. In his new preface, Hoffman describes the evolution of his critical method and suggests the book's value for contemporary readers.

I'll Take My Stand

I'll Take My Stand PDF Author: Twelve southerners
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807103579
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
First published in 1930, the essays in this manifesto constitute one of the outstanding cultural documents in the history of the South. In it, twelve southerners-Donald Davidson, John Gould Fletcher, Henry Blue Kline, Lyle H. Lanier, Stark Young, Allen Tate, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Herman Clarence Nixon, Frank Lawrence Owsley, John Crowe Ransom, John Donald Wade, and Robert Penn Warren-defended individualism against the trend of baseless conformity in an increasingly mechanized and dehumanized society.

Undead Souths

Undead Souths PDF Author: Eric Gary Anderson
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080716108X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Examines physical, symbolic, psychological, and cultural forms of undeadness in a variety of media and historical periods.

The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer PDF Author: Walker Percy
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453216251
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
In this National Book Award–winning novel from a “brilliantly breathtaking writer,” a young Southerner searches for meaning in the midst of Mardi Gras (The New York Times Book Review). On the cusp of his thirtieth birthday, Binx Bolling is a lost soul. A stockbroker and member of an established New Orleans family, Binx’s one escape is the movie theater that transports him from the falseness of his life. With Mardi Gras in full swing, Binx, along with his cousin Kate, sets out to find his true purpose amid the excesses of the carnival that surrounds him. Buoyant yet powerful, The Moviegoer is a poignant indictment of modern values, and an unforgettable story of a week that will change two lives forever. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Walker Percy including rare photos from the author’s estate.

The Fourth Ghost

The Fourth Ghost PDF Author: Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807133835
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
In the 1949 classic Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith described three racial "ghosts" haunting the mind of the white South: the black woman with whom the white man often had sexual relations, the rejected child from a mixed-race coupling, and the black mammy whom the white southern child first loves but then must reject. In this groundbreaking work, Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., extends Smith's work by adding a fourth "ghost" lurking in the psyche of the white South -- the specter of European Fascism. He explores how southern writers of the 1930s and 1940s responded to Fascism, and most tellingly to the suggestion that the racial politics of Nazi Germany had a special, problematic relevance to the South and its segregated social system. As Brinkmeyer shows, nearly all white southern writers in these decades felt impelled to deal with this specter and with the implications for southern identity of the issues raised by Nazism and Fascism. Their responses varied widely, ranging from repression and denial to the repulsion of self-recognition. With penetrating insight, Brinkmeyer examines the work of writers who contemplated the connection between the authoritarianism and racial politics of Nazi Germany and southern culture. He shows how white southern writers -- both those writing cultural criticism and those writing imaginative literature -- turned to Fascist Europe for images, analogies, and metaphors for representing and understanding the conflict between traditional and modern cultures that they were witnessing in Dixie. Brinkmeyer considers the works of a wide range of authors of varying political stripes: the Nashville Agrarians, W. J. Cash, Lillian Smith, William Alexander Percy, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and Lillian Hellman. He argues persuasively that by engaging in their works the vital contemporary debates about totalitarianism and democracy, these writers reconfigured their understanding not only of the South but also of themselves as southerners, and of the nature and significance of their art. The magnum opus of a distinguished scholar, The Fourth Ghost offers a stunning reassessment of the cultural and political orientation of southern literature by examining a major and heretofore unexplored influence on its development.