Shreve seems to be a narrator who has a need to repeat everything that the other narrator, Quentin says. He is different from Quentin because this last one tells the story from his father’s perspective, meaning that he knows the story based on what his father had told him or what he had heard others say. Quentin is in his room when Shreve gives a letter to Quentin, which comes from his father notifying him of Miss Rosa’s death. Then Shreve interrupts Quentin’s reading of the letter because he wants to know about the south. Shreve says, “Tell about the south. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all” (AA, 174). Shreve finds himself very interested in getting information about the south. It is important to mention that he is Canadian, thus, maybe his interest comes because he will like to know more about the people from other parts of the world and perhaps he will like to know more about where his roommate comes from. Quentin begins to tell him all he knows according to the information he learned from his father and others, and Shreve demonstrates this necessity of retelling what Quentin has said. 

He asks questions and summarizes everything Quentin says about Miss Rosa, Thomas Sutpen and his death at the hands of Wash Jones, his affair with the fifteen-year-old Milly, etc. In my opinion, Shreve is this type of person who needs confirmation, meaning that when he acquires information, he needs to paraphrase or retell what he has been told in order to demonstrate to himself and to the narrator that he is understanding the information that he is receiving. It can also be that he is very impressed and fascinated about the south that the retelling just gives him comfort. 

In structure, chapter 6 is divided into two sections. The first one is when Quentin is in Mississippi listening to other people tell the story about Sutpen. The second one is when he is at Harvard telling Sutpen’s story to Shreve. I can see Quentin is kind of reflecting on the story as he speaks and Shreve seems more and more into knowing about the south. Nonetheless, it is very interesting how Shreve needs confirmation of everything that Quentin says. For example, 

. . . son fled for good now with a noose behind him, daughter doomed to spinsterhood – and then almost before his foot was out of the stirrup he (the demon) set out and got himself engaged again in order to replace that progeny the hopes of which he had himself destroyed?” “Yes,” Quentin said” (AA, 179). 

Shreve listens carefully to every detail given by Quentin to then repeat them, but he also kind of gives his opinion because he says “the demon” in between the retelling. After he hears Quentin’s approval of his retelling, he then keeps going, asking questions, and making sure that he is capturing every aspect of the south. It looks impossible for him to just listen and maybe provide his opinion later; he needs the retelling.

Alongside the novels that we’ll All be using for primary texts, I found some very helpful sources that helped me to emphasize my main goal of discovering how the women in Faulkner challenge, survive, and arguably, thrive in a society influenced by a patriarchy. Aware of the limitations of some of the databases in terms of content, I went out and tried a handful such as Project muse, Jstor, Elibrary, Onesearch, and the MlA database. Regardless of how different thise databases are, I began my searches by filling in three advance search boxes with the same three key words: “Faulkner”, “Women”, “Masculinity.” It was incredible how the same three words vegetated new material under each database. Some articles repeated, but for each pair there were three new articles for me to dissect. In the end, I ended up choosing 5 of the 7-8 sources that I amassed. I chose these 5 because, after reading them, were just in the same ballpark of my intentions for my final project.

Clarke, Deborah. Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner. N.p., 1994. Print

• Arguably my favorite source out of the bunch, this source touches on the power of the women in Faulkner through their absence. I decided to focus only on the sections on Caddy, but the article continues to describe Addie’s agency as well.  What really drew me to this source is the described paradoxical power that Caddy has in Sound and the Fury. For example, this line says it best for now: “Caddy and Addie, caught in a world which vanquishes women’s bodies, nonetheless exert a powerful control over the literal and figurative, bodies and language, forcing brothers and sons to confront the fragility of their egos in the face of maternal power.”

BLAINE, DIANA. “The Abjection of Addie and Other Myths of the Maternal in ‘As I Lay Dying.’” The Mississippi quarterly 47.3 (1994): 419–439. Print.

• Chosen as a counter argument for the sake of having a peripheral view of all kinds of perspectives, this source stood out to me because of the harsh truth that despite the fact that Anse and some of the other characters are deemed “lacking” Addie is nevertheless dead and rotting as the story progresses. She possesses strength in language yet she is still just a dead body. I’ll start here and continue to flesh out.

Watkins, Ralph. “‘It Was Like I Was the Woman and She Was the Man’: Boundaries, Portals, and Pollution in ‘Light in August.’” The Southern literary journal 26.2 (1994): 11–24. Print.

• I was hooked by this source the second I read the abstract: “Throughout the book Faulkner explores the possibilities of placeless persons who exist partly inside and partly outside society. ‘Light in August’ recognizes the structure of the unconscious categories that shape all social relationships, providing the unifying theme that many deny exists in the book” Of course there are many other “placeless” characters like Joe Christmas, Brown, and Hightower, but my focus will be the placeless state of Lena who is without family, without class, yet she still moves forward.

Polk, Noel. Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition . Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Print.

• Interstingly enough, I found this source that pins Faulkner with Eudora Welty (woman) in a battle for the truth about literature chronicling the American South. Readers have adapted Faulkner’s view of the south and therefore his view on Women while totally misunderstanding actual women writers. 

Dews, C. L. (1999). Why I can’t read faulkner: Reading and resisting southern white masculinity. The Faulkner Journal, 15(1), 185.

• Here I came across an article written by a Southern specialist who ironically just can’t read Faulkner’s work. “He (Faulkner) may indeed have been racist, homophobic, and misogynistic.” Dews says. He continues on to debunk and resist southern masculinity as expressed in Faulkner’s work which ultimately also speaks to the role of women within this structure.

Baldwin, James. “Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the street / The devil Finds Work / Other Essays”, ed.ToniMorrison. The Library of America, New York, 1988a.

Initially intended to be a secondary text to further elucidate the contemporary reception of Faulkner’s handling of racial questions, Black characters and racism in the American South, Baldwin’s essay, “Faulkner and Desegreation,” has become one of the primary texts I hope to have a conversation with. In it Baldwin does not engage at all with Faulkner’s fiction — an intentional choice, no doubt, lest we use it to vault the man into an unhuman literary symbol — instead reckoning with the author’s public self and accordant statements. Baldwin uses Faulkner as an avatar for the less overt, less apparent racism that was (and still is, frankly) all too prevalent in America, specifically in the South. Baldwin writes to tear down any notion of Souther Apoligism and American Incrementalism, writing with attendant urgency, and insisting that we take in all of Faulkner’s public words as intentional. It’s a profoundly compelling and affecting piece, though I hope to complicate it by re-introducing it to the question of Faulkner’s work, and, to a lesser degree, Toni Morrison’s digestion of Faulkner as well.

Gorra, Michael. “The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War.” Liveright Publishing Company, New York, London, 2020.

In my original conception of this paper, I had hoped this would be the sort of foundational text outside of Faulkner’s novels. Instead — though it as wonderfully written, deeply researched read — it will, I think, act to help weight the margins with biography. Ultimately an argument for reading Faulkner in spite of his public contradictions — the very contradictions that Baldwin was writing about and against — Gorra’s book lasers in on Faulkner’s relationship to that great schism, the Civil War, to try and understand the post-war American South, and to reconcile the man’s abilities in his work to inhabit unfamiliar emotional and psychological territory with his more unfortunate views. I’ve read about 60% of the book at present, so I am not sure precisely which passages will be most illuminating, but in general, the text is helpful as a biographical tome, a targeted history of the Civil War’s affect on the many social strata of the white Southerner, and a read of Faulkner’s work in full view of the man.

Hartnell, Anna. “W. E. DU BOIS, WILLIAM FAULKNER, AND THE DIALECTIC OF BLACK AND WHITE: In Search of Exodus for a Postcolonial American South.” Callaloo, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Spring, 2010), pp. 521-536. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40732889.

An incredibly incisive dialogue opened up between the writings of civil rights activist, and socialist sociologist, Du Bois, the subject of the American South, and the works of Faulkner. Of particular interest because of the way that both Du Bois and Hartnell, in her excavation of all three, deal specifically with the work. Du Bois looks at the post-Reconstruction American South, and the realities of Black life there, as a parallel to Jews before achieving exodus, but excoriates the dissonances created and perpetuated by Faulkner’s work (no matter how humanist in intention). Du Bois, and Hartnell in turn, explore the complications when Faulkner’s somewhat idealized depiction of the South as full of souls in need of saving gets metabolized by the mainstream, including Southern Blacks, for whom desire for an empathetic read of those so outwardly hateful is understandable. This undergirds the Morrion piece and stands in interesting dialogue with Baldwin as well.

LaVoie, Mark. “William Faulkner’s Speech Accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature: A Language for Ameliorating Atomic Anxiety.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer 2014), pp. 199-226. Michigan State University Press, 2014. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.2.0199.

Another excellent bit of tangential biography tied to a specific moment in time — early Cold War anxiety. LaVoie does an excellent biographical reading of Faulkner’s contemporary work here, and though it is only related to my thesis in passing, I think it’s helpful to have a piece that reckons with the relationship of Faulkner’s public words and their relationship to his work, but that does not deal as immediately with the South or race, engaging with a more esoteric notion of America on the whole, and the nuclear-global anxieties of the time.

Penner, Erin. “For Those ‘Who Could Not Bear to Look Directly at the Slaughter’: Morrison’s “Home” and the Novels of Faulkner and Woolf.” African American Review, Vol. 49, No. 4, pp. 343- 359, Winter 2016. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26444084.

Penner, in her exploration of Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel, unravels three incredibly pertinent threads: the notion of suicide in the works of Faulkner, Morrison and Woolf — it’s key similarities and differences, including, a racial reading of suicide; Morrison’s relationship to these masters of Modernism, both as a literary torch-bearer (despite her insistence that they impacted her only as a person and reader, and not as a writer) and as a scholar (her master’s thesis is referenced throughout); and, Morrison’s own relationship to biographical readings of text. It brings Morrison into direct conversation with Faulkner, man and his work, but with Baldwin as well, whose ideas she seems aligned with, though she is eager to engage with the texts in depth, and clearly sees value there.

Polsgrove, Carol. “William Faulkner: No Friend of Brown v. Board of Education.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 32, pp. 93-99, Summer 2001. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2678790.

Another incisive bit of history that opens up the drunken interview around which Baldwin’s piece turns. Polsgrove deftly uses an anecdote about the 1952 National Book Awards — at which Faulkner was in attendance, along with Ralph Ellison, and then-Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas — to open up engage with Faulkner’s real life advocating on behalf of the white South, for “going slow” and sort-of against the titular landmark legislation of desegregation. Polsgrove, like Gorra, ultimately winds up feeling sympathy for Faulkner’s apologist tight-rope act and ends up an apologist herself, arguing that the merit and empathy of the man’s work should elevate him past his shortcomings. Another fascinating bit of biography, applicable history, and an attempt to square it with the work.

Porter, Carolyn. “William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies.” Oxford University Press, 2007.

I’m still doing some diffing outside of the selections made for class, but what this biography has continually hit on, which seems incredibly valuable, is an accounting for and assessment of Faulkner’s own version of his intention in his fiction. Whether we hold an author to be a credible authority on their own work is a question I intend to engage with, but Porter is pretty measured in her approach, and it lends a helpful background, particularly to the prolific period around creating such early works as TSAF and LIA.

Vendrame, Alessandra. “Toni Morrison: A Faulknerian Novelist?” Amerikastudien / American Studies, Vol. 42, No. 4, William Faulkner: German Responses, pp. 679-684 , 1997. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41157341.

Vendrame’s piece takes Morrison to task for her claims of not being influenced by the Modernists — Faulkner specifically — with whom she spent so much time as a scholar. I don’t necessarily think that she proves unequivocally that Morrison’s work is or is not indebted to Faulkner, but she does prove the effect that his work had on the latter as a reader. Threads of interest: Morrison’s relationship to memory and time in her work; another great example of examining a writer’s work via their public proclamations — Morrison this time.

Williams, Tyler. “How Faulkner Means Everything He Says: An Essay on James Baldwin’s Politics of Intentionality.” CR: The New Centennial Review , Vol. 15, No. 3, Literature and the Limit (Winter 2015), pp. 49-64. Michigan State University Press, 2015. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.15.3.0049.

A thorough assessment of the Baldwin essay, “Faulkner and Desegregation”. Williams capably unpacks and supports Baldwin’s argument, though with the added benefit of some decades of additional historical context for the country but also both men. Williams begins to gesture towards a broader discussion in which Baldwin might have allowed for Faulkner’s work to join the arena — all the while acknowledging Baldwin’s reasons for excluding it, and never questioning his right to do so — which is something I intend to take further in this paper.

The primary sources I’ll mainly use are The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. I’m still debating on whether to also incorporate As I Lay Dying or not. Most of my secondary sources come from JSTOR and the MLA International Bibliography. Apart from these I’ve used Google Scholar, OneSearch and Project Muse. I try to use keywords that connect Faulkner to things, or I’ll search for a character such as Quentin and “watch” to be more specific. Sometimes, it’ll work, other times it doesn’t. I’m also greatly incorporating thing theory into my paper, and connecting it to how objects function in Faulkner’s work. I’ve been searching the databases for thing theory, Bill Brown, and anyone who has had an approach on Brown’s theory. 

Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–22. JSTOR, 

This theoretical piece discusses the connection between people and objects. The biggest takeaway from this is that objects are not solely defined by their materiality, time and space. They also impose meaning on their surroundings and in turn acquire meaning from their surroundings as well. 

Andrews, Karen M. “The Shaping of Joanna Burden in ‘Light in August.’” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 26, no. 1/2, 1991, pp. 3–12. JSTOR

Andrews’ work does a great job in critically analyzing Joanna Burden’s character. She especially focuses on Burden’s ancestral past in connection to the larger encompassing theme of the novel: race. Burden’s actions are also analyzed as being a product of her upbringing, and her relationship with Christmas is examined in three phases. 

Feldman, Robert L. “IN DEFENSE OF REVEREND HIGHTOWER: IT IS NEVER TOO LATE.” CLA Journal, vol. 29, no. 3, 1986, pp. 352–367. JSTOR

Feldman critically analyzes Gail Hightower and his metamorphosis into life. This journal piece focuses on Hightower’s long philosophical discourse. Hightower’s upbringing is also analyzed as it is the apotheosis in Hightower’s chapter which helps the reader’s understanding of his character.

Moore, Aaron. “Faulkner’s Closest to God in The Sound and the Fury.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 13, no. 1/2, 2011, pp. 77–86. JSTOR

Moore’s piece is very interesting, he opens up with an overview of Jean-Paul Sartre’s take on time and objects in TSAF (Sartre’s piece is one we read for class). He also explains Sartre’s two modes of being which heavily explores object as either being or becoming (liminal state). Moore then goes on to analyze Quentin’s character and his fixation on time. The best part about this piece is that Moore directly discusses the watch and its significance.  

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Things and Theory.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review, vol.25, no. 2, 2005, pp. 134-145. 

Harpham’s Journal is in itself a take on Bill Brown’s thing theory. Harpham explores objects and asserts that things are not merely things devoid of identity, things have an individuality that emits from themselves to their surroundings. We ourselves recognize ourselves through things and transform ourselves through them.

Whereas Rosa Coldfield narrates from a personal place and Jason Compson narrates from what his father told him, Shreve narrates by repeating what Quentin told him right back at him. This need to tell Quentin what he already knows along with some of his own additions shows that Shreve is completely swept away by this story. Since he is a Canadian, it could be that he is fascinated with the south. He seems particularly taken by Sutpen’s decline when he comes home from war to find his plantation filled with weeds and his heirs, dead in Bon’s case and ran away in Henry’s as well as telling Sutpen’s own death, “Came back home and found his chances of descendants gone where his children had attended to that, and his plantation ruined, fields fallow except for a find stand of weeds, and levies and penalties sowed by United States marshals and such” (AA 146). The way Shreve emphasizes this aspect as a high tragedy and the end of Sutpen’s “great destiny” makes it seem almost like he is romanticizing the south’s loss of “honor” after the Civil War through the individual story Sutpen.

An interesting thing to note, is that Quentin notices that “He sounds just like father” (AA 147). This had me asking myself what Shreve and Jasonwould have in common in their retellings of the Sutpen story. I believe that because Jason Compson received the story from his father, General Compson, this is part of the reason for the enthusiasm about it. General Compson, as a southern war hero, being the first to tell this story that is symbolic for southern decline has a certain authority to it. Therefore, Jason is prideful in his retelling because of his father. Shreve with his fascination with the south, perhaps sees Quentin in a similar way. Quentin, while not a war hero, is the closest thing to the romanticized south for Shreve. The way he stops in the middle of his narratives for Quentin to confirm his retelling with a simple “yes” shows this.

It is also interesting that Shreve constantly makes the same mistake of calling Rosa, Aunt Rosa which Quentin has to correct him multiple times. With the amount of times he makes this mistake even after all the corrections, I believe that Shreve thinks that calling her Aunt Rosa instead of Miss Rosa gives the story more drama. This need to have Rosa be related to Quentin would perhaps give the story more legitimacy than even the fact that she is a first-person account and even Quentin’s war hero grandfather, General Compson. The way he insists on calling her Aunt Rosa becomes comical in scenes like this:

“then Shreve again, ‘Wait. Wait. You mean that old gal, this Aunt Rosa’

‘Miss Rosa,’ Quentin said.

‘All right all right. – that old dame, this Aunt Rosa’

‘Miss Rosa, I tell you.’

‘All right all right all right. – that this old – this Aunt R – All right all right all right all right.’” (AA 143-144)

This happens multiple times afterwards and Shreve doesn’t seem to want to get the hint. It could also be that the only southerner Shreve knows is Quentin and therefore, he likes the idea of grouping all southerners together as if they were related. Which naturally irritates Quentin. However, I also wonder if Quentin has another reason for being annoyed by being connected to Rosa. Rosa is clearly stuck in the past – a similar situation Quentin himself is dealing with in light of the events of The Sound and the Fury. It is a subtle thing that Shreve’s narrative exposes in Quentin as well as expresses his own romanticizing of the south as an outsider.

Berman, Jill. “‘this was the answer to it’: Sexuality and Maternity in As I Lay Dying.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3, 1996, p. 393. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A57535131/AONE?u=nysl_ca_nyempire&sid=AONE&xid=4cc1ecee. 

This article focuses on the way Faulkner represents women in  As I Lay Dying. It gives a deeper idea of the way Addie expresses herself in her monologue and explains how she desires to experience herself in isolation instead of as a mother. Addie believes that her “aloneness was invaded when Cash was born, thus, the article reinforces the idea of how women were portrayed at that time. 

Blaine, Diana York. “The abjection of Addie and other myths of the maternal in ‘As I Lay Dying.’ (Special Issue: William Faulkner).” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3, 1994, p. 419+. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A15939705/AONE?u=nysl_ca_nyempire&sid=AONE&xid=1127da5

This article explores the idea that the prolonged death and burial of Addie is related to her representation as a mother, monster, victim, victimizer. The author also explains how in the nineteenth century, femininity and death caused a disorder to stability. Addie is a good example of this because of the ideas she expresses from her coffin. 

Chan, Amado. “Stereotypical, but revengeful and defiant: Addie Bundren in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 2001, p. 118+. Gale Literature Resource Center, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A83038238/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=214a427f. 

The author talks about the stereotypical fact of women being seen as inferior to men. He mentions how women had to be married and raise children in order to obtain status in society. By marrying Anse and raising five children, Addie does not achieve her desire for aloneness because she lives in a society where women have to be mothers and wives to pertain to society. He also suggests that Addie’s decision to be buried with her dead relatives is a form of revenge for Anse’s flaws. 

Chase, Greg. “Acknowledging Addie’s pain: language, Wittgenstein, and As I Lay Dying.” Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 63, no. 2, 2017, p. 167+. Gale Literature Resource Center, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A498130103/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=d6af6ba5.

This focuses on the relationship between language and experience. The author talks about Addie’s idea that language fails to communicate her private experience to others and supports this concept that language cannot be even a substitute for experience. The article mentions the words that Addie repudiates such as “motherhood” and “sin” and how her attitude affects her children. 

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Vintage International, 1985.

This is my primary source. I will be focusing on Addie’s monologue. I will use quotes where she expresses her desire for “aloneness”, how her life has been, and what she thinks about being a mother. Also, I will use quotes relating to her idea of language. 

Hewson, Marc. “‘My children were of me alone’: Maternal Influence in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 4, 2000, p. 551. Gale Literature Resource Center, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A76800196/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=855c384d. 

The author describes Addie as the most “perplexing and vexing figure” of As I Lay Dying. He explains the concepts that the critics have about Addie, how we, readers, see her, how the other characters see her, and how she sees herself. The author mentions how other critics identify Addie as the “mythical mother of death”. However, the author prefers to see her as a teaching model, especially to the male children, to combat the oppressive patriarchal world that is presented in the book. 

Hustis, Harriet. “The Tangled Webs We Weave: Faulkner Scholarship and the Significance of Addie Bundren’s Monologue.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, 1996, pp. 3–21. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24907827. 

In this article, we can see that the author focuses on Addie’s knowledge about the use of language in society and culture. She seems limited to being a mother, a wife, and a woman. The author believes that Addie’s monologue is the important part of the novel since the rest of it just demonstrates the absurdity of human life. However, her monologue has been devalued. 

I continue my research process using the Hunter Library Database, by using OneSearch.  I used the keywords “Faulkner AND women”. I had trouble finding recent sources and I used the resource from Hunter College Library “Ask a Librarian.” This was really helpful because she redirected me and told me to use the database Gale Literature, where I found most of my sources. I used advanced search, typing “Faulkner,” AND As I Lay Dying AND Addie, but I got no results. Later, when I only searched using the name of the work, and I was able to find sources that are relevant to my topic.

My earlier post about the search words and methods for research were effective because that is how I found these sources. The search words being “Faulkner and gender,” “Faulkner and women,” “Southern womanhood,” and “southern manhood.” I found them on Hunter’s Ebrary. These sources helped me with my thesis of how the characters of Caddy, Lena, Quentin II, and Addie subvert the standards of white southern womanhood. They helped by giving some cultural context, relevant information about Faulkner, and some very interesting analysis of some of these characters.

Bleikasten, André. The Ink of Melancholy : Faulkner’s Novels from the Sound and the Fury to Light in August, Indiana University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4746225.

Bleikasten has a really interesting analysis that parallels Jason’s relationship to Quentin II with Quentin’s relationship with Caddy. Both are relationships that seek to control their sexualities, and this emphasizes in my essay how Quentin II is a lot freer than her mother, Caddy.

Clarke, Deborah. Robbing The Mother : Women in Faulkner, University Press of Mississippi, 1992. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=866930.

Clarke analyzes Lena Grove and how her rejection of southern womanhood is a threat to patriarchy but in a way that can go unpunished (unlike Joe Christmas) and is hence much more dangerous. This emphasizes my point of Lena’s mixing of gender standards, that being her not experiencing her pregnancy in a home and travelling like a “man” while also being gentle and soft like a “woman.”

Cotsell, Michael. William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, edited by Charles Moseley, Humanities-Ebooks, LLP, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3306098.

Cotsell explains how Faulkner has a Nietzschean view which explains his openness to subverting his own southern world including the rigid rules that women had to follow to be considered a proper woman.  

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Vintage International, 1985.

This is my primary source for all material regarding Addie Bundren. The quotes I use support my point about how she is the contrast to Caddy, Quentin II, and Lena in how she remained at home despite her frustration. She still explores her sexuality like the others, but it is in secret with no intention to eventually free herself from her home.

Faulkner, William. Light in August. Vintage International, 1985.

This is my primary source for all material regarding Lena Grove. The quotes I use support my point that Lena subverts southern womanhood by accepting her pregnancy out of wedlock and by travelling which is a masculine act by the standards of that time.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Vintage International, 1984.

This is my primary source for all material regarding Caddy and Quentin II. The quotes I use support my point that while both of them explore their sexualities and reject southern womanhood in that sense, they differ in how they leave the Compson home.

Norman, Brian. Dead Women Talking : Figures of Injustice in American Literature, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3318641.

Norman explains how Addie’s form of obtaining her long-desired isolation was through dying. This connects to my point about how Addie is a direct contrast to Caddy (though are some similarities of debt in this case), Quentin II, and Lena because while these women left their home living, Addie left as dead.

Sensibar, Judith L.. Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3420510.

Sensibar supplements my paper by explaining what the women in Faulkner’s life were like as well as his own relationship to gender. Since my paper is about how Caddy, Addie, Lena, and Quentin II do not fit into the white southern conventions of womanhood, Faulkner’s background with women and gender is relevant.

Southern Masculinity : Perspectives on Manhood in the South since Reconstruction, edited by Craig Thompson Friend, University of Georgia Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3038788.

Southern Manhood explains how masculinity in the south evolved from chivalry to a more aggressive form post-Civil War which includes disinterest in the home since the home is considered feminine. This assists my argument because Caddy, Quetin II, and Lena all perform the masculine role of leaving their homes which leads to their freedom.

Faulkner’s works center around the Reconstruction, an important era for racial relations but also for economics. Faulkner’s criticisms of the South failing to adjust to the dismantling of slavery can also be interpreted as a criticism of capitalism, seeing as American capitalism was built on slave labor. Critiques of capitalism are central to the plots of each of faulkners books (I will be focusing on the first 3 we’ve read). In The Sound and The Fury the Compson’s failure to adjust and being stuck in time is speaking of an antiquated system thats stuck in time and how capitalism will not be able to survive. Jason shorting the market and being a symbol of the evils of greed as a whole speaks on the immorality of capitalism. As I Lay Dying centers around the misfortunes that come to a family because of the greed of Anse. The isolation the family feels can be interpreted as the alienation of the proletariat. Light in August focuses so deeply on the mill being the center of the town and that the very livelihood of every member of the town is so connected to their labor at the mill. 

Bibliography

Atkinson, Ted. Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics. First Edition (1st printing), University of Georgia Press, 2006.

The great depression brought on many critiques of capitalism as it was on of capitalism’s greatest failures. Faulkner was one of the many writers of the era influenced by the crumbling economy around him. 

Godden, Richard. William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words (20/21). Princeton University Press, 2007.

Focuses on forms of labor specifically and the economy of plantation systems in relation to capitalism. 

Matthews, John. William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South. 1st ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

A historical context to Faulkner’s writings about a south that is losing its glory and it’s guilt of the past. 

Trefzer, Annette, and Ann Abadie. Global Faulkner (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha) (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series). University Press of Mississippi, 2006.

Particularly the chapter “The Fetish of Surplus Value; or, What the Ledgers Say”. A lot at markets, profit, gambling and other issues of the greed of capitalism especially relevant to Jason. 

Watson, Jay, and Ann Abadie. Faulkner’s Geographies (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series). Reprint, University Press of Mississippi, 2017. 

Connects historical southern events such as beacon’s rebellion to the evolution of capitalism. Also links the invention of the white race to the class system which is the base of capitalism. 

For my search i used the OneSearch tool to look up Faulkner and browsed through titles until I saw something that might be relevant to economics and then skimmed the table of contents for a sense of what the book is about. I found when I include economics as a key word it left out a lot of books that were helpful just because they didn’t have that word particularly i.e a book about the plantation system is still dealing with economics but would get filtered out by the search. Since the Great Depression lent itself to communist theories and literature such as the most notable Grapes of Wrath, a lot of historical analyses of Faulkner’s works lend themselves very well to finding the critiques of capitalism in his works.

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.

Genuinely, these sources were bookmarked on my laptop for a week and I thought I already handed this in.

I plan on focusing on the femme fatale, the ingenue and the depictions of masculinity in the big sleep as compared to Faulkners works. I do not know if I will have time to read sanctuary though I will try. This list will definitely be whittled down. Possibly, I’d also like to explore depictions of sexuality since “The Big Sleep” has a central issue of sexuality and pornography at the center of its investigation and the works we’ve read so far (The Sound and the Fury and Light in August) have a central theme of female virginity, sexuality and promoscuity. I mostly used Jstor using the key words ‘Faulkner’ combined with ‘femme fatale’ ‘film noir’ and ‘The Big Sleep’.

Mecholsky, Kristopher. “‘The Mansion’ as Soft-Boiled Noir.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2014, pp. 79–93. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24908435. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Dussere, Erik. “Introduction: Unknown Legends.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2014, pp. 3–10. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24908431. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Robbins, Ben. “Inscrutable Images and Cultural Migrations: Wartime Noir and the Compson Appendix.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2014, pp. 55–77. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24908434. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Osteen, Mark. “Dark Mirrors: ‘Sanctuary’’s Noir Vision.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2014, pp. 11–35. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24908432. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Fluck, Winfried. “Crime, Guilt, and Subjectivity in ‘Film Noir.’” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 46, no. 3, 2001, pp. 379–408. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41157665. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Conley, Tom. “Stages of ‘Film Noir.’” Theatre Journal, vol. 39, no. 3, 1987, pp. 347–363. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3208154. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Librach, Ronald S. “ADAPTATION AND ONTOLOGY: The Impulse towards Closure in Howard Hawks’s Version of ‘The Big Sleep.’” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 3, 1991, pp. 164–175. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43796498. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

FONTANA, ERNEST. “Chivalry and Modernity in Raymond Chandler’s ‘The Big Sleep.’” Western American Literature, vol. 19, no. 3, 1984, pp. 179–186. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43020380. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

KENLEY, NICOLE. “The Southern Hard(Ly)Boiled: Knight’s Gambit, The Big Sleep, and Faulkner’s Construction of the Popular.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 3, 2012, pp. 339–366. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26467195. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Rzepka, Charles J. “‘I’M IN THE BUSINESS TOO’: GOTHIC CHIVALRY, PRIVATE EYES, AND PROXY SEX AND VIOLENCE IN CHANDLER’S ‘THE BIG SLEEP.’” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 46, no. 3, 2000, pp. 695–724. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26286071. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Robbins, Ben. “Inscrutable Images and Cultural Migrations: Wartime Noir and the Compson Appendix.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2014, pp. 55–77. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24908434. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

“William Faulkner.” Hawks on Hawks, by Joseph McBride, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, 2013, pp. 69–72. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt4cgsgb.14. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

TROMLY, LUCAS. “‘Lady Tiger in a Tea Gown’: Decadence, Kitsch, and Faulkner’s ‘Femme Fatale.’” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 3, 2009, pp. 457–477. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26476715. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Faulkner, William, and Sarah Gleeson-White. William Faulkner at Twentieth Century-Fox: the Annotated Screenplays. Oxford University Press, 2017. 

(CJ was kind enough to email me a copy of the last source a while ago cause he’s a great dude)