In short, I want to use my research as an opportunity to really understand the theory of language presented by Addie in AILD. To me, this means understanding desire first, as according to her, language is but desire atrophied. I want to investigate how this conception of language manifests in Faulkner’s writing (though the theory is expressed in AILD, I feel like TSATF and, so far as we’ve read of it at least, AA! are better at demonstrating it), and I want to see to what end this kind of language/desire serves. I’m not quite sure how I’ll approach this yet. I’ve found some of the vocabulary of the critic Mikhail Bakhtin helpful in articulating the direction I might go, but I don’t intend to cite him in any meaningful way nor make my analysis a dialogical one—though it’s not out the table, of course. Rather, I find useful what Bakhtinian scholars will often refer to as the “interanimation of languages,” which is the fundamental movement at work between languages in discourse—languages here understood as more dialects of distinct milieus and which are heteroglossically stratified. Languages, these scholars contend, confront and animate one another during discourse, out of which is meaning derived. I suppose what I want to investigate in Faulkner’s fiction may very well be called the interanimation of desire, which, if we stay faithful to Addie’s theory, operates at the level of language. I think this naturally asserts a kind of dimension of sociality to desire, a characterization I think consistent with Faulkner’s novels, wherein desire does not exist in a vacuum but is deeply dependent on the totality of what came before, the past, and where histories of desires, so to speak, are recapitulated in the patronymics which dominate his novels—Compson and Sutpen and Bundren and Snopes, etc. I don’t know what this analysis looks like yet beyond that it will be anchored by Addie’s theory: perhaps trying to articulate a kind of poetics of desire in Faulkner’s work, or something more psychoanalytic—though I don’t want to put Faulkner on the couch—or trying to reconcile a relationship between desire and what is called history in his work. All these potential directions are a little ambiguous at the moment, though, so I’m hesitant to pick any which one.

Bibliography

I found most my sources on JSTOR, kind of just using key words like “words,” “desire,” “language,” “style,” “poetics,” “history,” “aesthetics,” etcetera, till something came up. A lot from the Faulkner Journal came up. I found A Companion to Faulkner Studies on the Zotero library.

Broughton, Panthea Reid. “The Economy of Desire: Faulkner’s Poetics, From Eroticism to Post-Impressionism,” The Faulkner Journal, Fall 1988/Spring 1989, Vol. 4, pp. 159-177.

Hannon, Charles. “The Function of Function Words in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying,” The Faulkner Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 3-21.

Hurh, J. Paul. “Dirimens Copulatio and Metalinguistic Negation in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” Style, Vol. 42, No. 1, Interview with Gerald Graff, Essays on Faulkner and on Language in Africa-American Fiction (Spring 2008), pp. 22-47.

Sass, Karen R. “At a Loss for Words: Addie and Language in As I Lay Dying,” The Faulkner Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2 (SPRING 1991), pp. 9-21.

A Companion to Faulkner Studies, edited by Charles Peek, and Robert Hamblin, ABC-CLIO, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=491386.