Missed the class session, but I had already done a fair amount of digging. I haven’t culled all of these texts yet, and will probably lose more than a few and swap some out. Nor have I assessed which pages or passages of the full texts, but that is in process and will be included prior to the longform biblio.

The primary novels from our class which I intend to use are Light in August and The Sound and the Fury–though his depiction of poor whites in As I Lay Dying is certainly relevant, and Absalom seems sure to have an impact on the direction of the piece. Beyond that, I am primarily interested in putting Faulkner into conversation with the previously mentioned Baldwin essay, the recent exploration of the Civil War in his work by Michael Gorra, and the Matthews from class.

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. 

Bronstein, Michaela. “How Not to Re-read Novels: The Critical Value of First Reading.” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Spring 2016), pp. 76-94. Indiana University Press, 2016. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.39.3.06.

Carden, Mary Paniccia. “Fatherless Children and Post-Patrilineal Futures in William Faulkner’s Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses.” The Faulkner Journal, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Fall 2013), pp. 51-75. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Fall 2013. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24908424.

Dominy, Jordan. “Southern Studies as Area Studies: Faulkner and Provincial Nationalism during the Cold War.” American Studies, 2014, Vol. 53, No. 4 (2014), pp. 31-48. Mid-America American Studies Association, 2014. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24589396.

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

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.

Hubbs, Jolene. “William Faulkner’s Rural Modernism.” The Mississippi Quarterly , , Vol. 61, No. 3, Special Issue on Faulkner, Labor, and the Critique of Capitalism (Summer 2008), pp. 461-475. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Summer 2008. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26476776.

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.

Lurie, Peter. “Introduction: Faulkner and the Metropolis.” The Faulkner Journal, Spring 2012, Vol. 26, No. 1, Special Issue: Faulkner and the Metropolis (Spring 2012), pp. 3-16. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24908397.

Matthews, John T. “William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South.” Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
— “As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age.” boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 1, “New Americanists 2: National Identities and Post National Narratives” (Spring, 1992), pp. 69-94. Duke University Press, 1992. JSTSOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/303451.

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.

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.

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

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.

I attempted various methods of research, but ultimately ended up primarily on JSTOR. I”m having a hard time finding sources that directly speak about objects in Faulkner (i.e Burden’s gun, Hightower’s coat), the easiest one to find was Quentin’s watch. I might have to focus on character analysis while weaving in the objects and the role they play in the novels or in Faulkner’s world. I may also end up having to rely heavily on theory (which is something I love) but I fear that this may be too broad and not specific enough. I’ve greatly enjoyed Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory” and will most definitely rely on it, I’m trying to find more theoretical work to amplify my potential arsenal of evidence. Overall, I would like to have more outside textual evidence on things in Faulkner’s work, but I also recognize that there are many potential pathways to approach my research question.

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, www.jstor.org/stable/1316550.

Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–22. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1344258.

Feldman, Robert L. “IN DEFENSE OF REVEREND HIGHTOWER: IT IS NEVER TOO LATE.” CLA Journal, vol. 29, no. 3, 1986, pp. 352–367. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44321908.

Fowler, Doreen. “‘I Am Dying’: Faulkner’s Hightower and the Oedipal Moment.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 9, no. 1/2, 1993, pp. 139–148. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24907660.

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, www.jstor.org/stable/41328513.

Swiggart, Peter. “TIME IN FAULKNER’S NOVELS.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 1955, pp. 25–29. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26276865.

TULLY, SUSAN HAYES. “Joanna Burden: ‘It’s the Dead Folks That Do Him the Damage.”.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 4, 1987, pp. 355–371. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26475418.

My research process went fairly smoothly. I accessed Hunter’s online database, Proquest (Ebrary) and found these six sources. The most useful search terms I used were “Faulkner and gender,” “Faulkner and men,” “Faulkner and women,” and “Faulkner and the south.” These terms helped me to find various articles and journals that were very helpful to my writing process. Even when I didn’t end up using a source, I learned something new which was a great experience. In the moments I was having trouble finding a source for a particular point, I tried consulting Jstor, Google Scholar, and others but couldn’t find what I was looking for. I went back to Ebrary and eventually found what I needed. Even though I didn’t find anything on the other databases, learning the different styles of searching for information will be useful in the future I’m sure.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

What is Southern identity exactly, is there such a thing, or is it constantly being recreated in Faulkner’s world? Is it the traditional Mrs. Compson with her “medieval keys” and Quentin’s unwavering chivalric code? Or is it the little Italian girl, shunned by the bakery owner, or maybe even a “new woman” like Lena Grove? I’m interested in how Faulkner depicts the changing South through generational differences and symbols (the egg money, Jason’s stocks), as something that is both stagnant and constantly transforming. I’d be focusing on either TSAF or LIA, or both, and the ways in which the novels figure Southern identity in contradictory ways. I’m also really interested in how immigration is portrayed in TSAF and would like to somehow incorporate this into my research. I’d like to find out more about the inclusion of the little Italian girl in the first novel, since this is the first time I’ve read about a first-generation immigrant in a Southern novel (most of the time we only hear about 1920s immigrants in NYC, especially Italian). My research question is a bit scattered at the moment, but I’m working on making it more specific as I do more research. One quote from the introduction to TSAF that’s sort of the backbone of what I’m getting at is, “There is a thing known whimsically as the New South to be sure, but it is not the south. It is a land of Immigrants who are rebuilding the towns and cities into replicas of
towns and cities in Kansas and Iowa and Illinois…”.

In his landmark 1956 essay “Faulkner and Desegregation”, James Baldwin excoriates Faulkner on biographical terms, choosing to engage with the author’s actions statements rather than deal with his fiction, culminating with an all-time line mic drop, at once weary and withering, in reference to contradictory statements of Faulkner’s on Racial Progress and the Soul of the American South:

“Faulkner means everything he says, means them all at once, and with very nearly the same intensity. He has perhaps never before more concretely expressed what it means to be a Southerner.”

It is indeed maddening to try and square the radical humanism of much of Faulkner’s work — radical when taken in the context of the time of writing, and radical when one considers the constant formal reinventions he engages with to try and reckon with psyches different from his own — with the man’s rather retrograde, beyond-incrementalist real world views. If you read his work squarely in a biographical lens, the contradictions may prove total, as they did to Baldwin. Conversely, I feel it would be letting the man off too easy, to approach the work exclusively on its own thematic or formal merit. I’d like to propose a middle-ground: to try and read Faulkner’s biography through his thematic and formal obsessions — specifically with time, the past, and particularly an American Southern Past — to try and understand if perhaps the inability of many of Faulkner’s most enduring characters to imagine a future for themselves can elucidate how the same man could be capable of such deep empathy in his writing and comfortable with shorting real-life progress at the expense of the humanity of Others. I hope to put Faulkner’s early novels — particularly Light in August and the Sound and the Fury — in direct conversation with Baldwin’s rebuke, to try and understand the author via his work rather than in spite of it, and to see if there might be parallels to a sort of ‘Boomer Inertia’ in our Country’s present day.

I mean, who else was just thrilled when they learned that we wouldn’t know who the next president was for about a week or so due to slow vote counting. Anyways, my research topic is still being developed and not yet finalized or set in stone. But one topic that was brought up last week that definitely peaked my interest was learning that the Nazi Party of Germany pre-World War II had studied the American South and how southern states had organized themselves during the time of slavery. More significantly, how the southern powers at be “handled” minority groups with control and brutal oppression. I think I want to expand on that, especially since Faulkner writes from a Southern perspective and that many of his most famous books were authored and published during the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930’s. So one central question that I can come up with is essentially: what southern influences or practices did the Nazi’s study to incorporate in their own ideology and how does Faulkner write about some of these ideas in his novels?

In both novels, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, we perceive the struggles that Caddy, Addie, and Dewey Dell go through in order to “freely” make decisions about their lives. I would like to know more about the reason why Faulkner decided to present them in such a way. My question is: What is William Faulkner’s purpose in the way he portraits women’s desire or their way to reach that desire in the novels TSAF and AILD? What do critics think about the way Faulkner portraits women’s desire?

I’d like to write my paper on Faulkner and the noir genre, how he influenced it as one of the first screen writers of it and how it influenced his writing after he started penning screenplays for The Big Sleep. I’d also like to research if there are any thematic overlaps between noir in general and his work, was it a symbiotic and easy transition for Faulkner or did it change his writing over time? Essentially the relationship between noir and Faulkners other works.

I sketched out the argument of my final paper in my most recent blog post, “Notes Toward a Kleinian Reading of Light in August.” So far I know that I will be using the article “Envy and Gratitude” by Melanie Klein, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein by Hanna Segal, and of course Light in August itself. There are two areas that I’d like to explore with further research:

1) How was miscegenation con in the deep south in the 1930s? Joe Christmas seems to have internalized the view that miscegenation is undesirable, but getting more specifics on this will help me get at Joe’s internal state.

2) What other psychoanalytic approaches have been taken toward Joe Christmas by literary critics? This will help inform my argument, and if my paper is too short I can pad the length by placing my own argument in the context of others.

Faulkner’s world features various characters who possess ancestral relics which are loaded in terms of symbolism and literal meaning. Quentin Compson’s watch, Joanna Burden’s gun, and Gail Hightower’s coat are all inherited objects that connect these characters to their ancestral past which looms over them throughout their respective sections in the novels. I’m curious as to what function they play in the text, how do they connect to the broader theme in the text (i.e race and time), and perhaps a close textual analysis that helps decipher their meaning especially in relation to the Southern historical past which appears to greatly influence the present.