Download or read book Faulkner on the Color Line written by Theresa M. Towner and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study argues that Faulkner's writings about racial matters interrogated rather than validated his racial beliefs and that, in the process of questioning his own ideology, his fictional forms extended his reach as an artist. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1950, Faulkner wrote what critics term “his later novels.” These have been almost uniformly dismissed, with the prevailing view being that as he became a more public figure, his fiction became a platform rather than a canvas. Within this context Faulkner on the Color Line redeems the novels in the final phase of his career by interpreting them as Faulkner's way of addressing the problem of race in America. They are seen as a series of formal experiments Faulkner deliberately attempted as he examined the various cultural functions of narrative, most particularly those narratives that enforce American racial ideology. The first chapters look at the ways in which the ability to assert oneself verbally informs matters of individual and cultural identity in both the widely studied works of Faulkner's major phase and those in his later career. Later chapters focus on the last works, providing detailed readings of Intruder in the Dust, Requiem for a Nun, the Snopes trilogy, A Fable, and The Reivers. The book examines Faulkner as he confronted the vexing questions of race in these novels and assesses the identity of Faulkner as the Nobel Prize winner who claimed on many occasions that he was “tired,” maybe “written out.” In his decision not to speak in the identity of the Black people represented in his fiction, in his decision to write instead about the complexities of all racial constructions, he produced a host of characters suffering within the rigid protocols on race that had been enforced in America for centuries. As a private, white individual, he could never be other than what he was. Rather than attempt to reconcile Faulkner the public man with the private one, however, this study concludes that through his fiction Faulkner the artist questioned himself and came to understand others across the color line.

Download or read book Nationalism and the Color Line in George W Cable Mark Twain and William Faulkner written by Barbara Ladd and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner is a strikingly original study of works by three postbellum novelists with strong ties to the Deep South and Mississippi Valley. In it, Barbara Ladd argues that writers like Cable, Twain, and Faulkner cannot be read exclusively within the context of a nationalistically defined "American" literature, but must also be understood in light of the cultural legacy that French and Spanish colonialism bestowed on the Deep South and the Mississippi River Valley, specifically with respect to the very different ways these colonialist cultures conceptualized race, color, and nationality.Ladd probes the work of these writers for discontinuities, for moments of narrative incoherence, from which she charts the ideological winds that blew through the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Cable's The Grandissimes, written at the beginning of the Redemption era, the discontinuities are strategic whispers to the reader about the reality of racial division and violence that lay beneath the white reconciliation romance. Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins also inscribes racial discord, although with the added dimension of experimentation with form. And in Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August, narrative incoherence becomes central as Faulkner explores the impact of radical racism on the ways that whiteness was constructed in the early twentieth century. Neither "race" nor "nation," Ladd shows, is stable in the work of these writers, but is always contested and shifting.Ladd's book raises provocative questions about the relationships between race, region, and nationalism in literary study. With its innovative approach and rich New Historicist method, it is an important contribution to scholarship in several fields.

Download or read book Sounding the Color Line written by Erich Nunn and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sounding the Color Line explores how competing understandings of the U.S. South in the first decades of the twentieth century have led us to experience musical forms, sounds, and genres in racialized contexts. Yet, though we may speak of white or black music, rock or rap, sounds constantly leak through such barriers. A critical disjuncture exists, then, between actual interracial musical and cultural forms on the one hand and racialized structures of feeling on the other. This is nowhere more apparent than in the South. Like Jim Crow segregation, the separation of musical forms along racial lines has required enormous energy to maintain. How, asks Nunn, did the protocols structuring listeners' racial associations arise? How have they evolved and been maintained in the face of repeated transgressions of the musical color line? Considering the South as the imagined ground where conflicts of racial and national identities are staged, this book looks at developing ideas concerning folk song and racial and cultural nationalism alongside the competing and sometimes contradictory workings of an emerging culture industry. Drawing on a diverse archive of musical recordings, critical artifacts, and literary texts, Nunn reveals how the musical color line has not only been established and maintained but also repeatedly crossed, fractured, and reformed. This push and pull--between segregationist cultural logics and music's disrespect of racially defined boundaries--is an animating force in twentieth-century American popular culture.

Download or read book Dancing on the Color Line written by Gretchen Martin and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2015-12-09 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extensive influence of the creative traditions derived from slave culture, particularly black folklore, in the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black authors, such as Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, has become a hallmark of African American scholarship. Yet similar inquiries regarding white authors adopting black aesthetic techniques have been largely overlooked. Gretchen Martin examines representative nineteenth-century works to explore the influence of black-authored (or narrated) works on well-known white-authored texts, particularly the impact of black oral culture evident by subversive trickster figures in John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, Joel Chandler Harris's short stories, as well as Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson. As Martin indicates, such white authors show themselves to be savvy observers of the many trickster traditions and indeed a wide range of texts suggest stylistic and aesthetic influences representative of the artistry, subversive wisdom, and subtle humor in these black figures of ridicule, resistance, and repudiation. The black characters created by these white authors are often dismissed as little more than limited, demeaning stereotypes of the minstrel tradition, yet by teasing out important distinctions between the wisdom and humor signified by trickery rather than minstrelsy, Martin probes an overlooked aspect of the nineteenth-century American literary canon and reveals the extensive influence of black aesthetics on some of the most highly regarded work by white American authors.

Download or read book Hemingway Race and Art written by Marc K. Dudley and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Faulkner has long been considered the great racial interrogator of the early twentieth-century South. In "Hemingway, Race, and Art", author Marc Kevin Dudley suggests that Ernest Hemingway not only shared Faulkner's racial concerns but extended them beyond the South to encompass the entire nation. Though Hemingway wrote extensively about Native Americans and African Americans, always in the back of his mind was Africa. Dudley sees Hemingway's fascination with, and eventual push toward, the African continent as a grand experiment meant to both placate and comfort the white psyche, and to challenge and unsettle it, too. Dudley demonstrates how Hemingway's interest in race was closely aligned to a national anxiety over a changing racial topography. Affected by his American pedigree, his masculinity, and his whiteness, Hemingway's treatment of race is characteristically complex, at once both a perpetuation of type and a questioning of white self-identity. "Hemingway, Race, and Art" expands our understanding of Hemingway and his work and shows how race consciousness pervades the text of one of America's most important and influential writers. -- From publisher's description.

Download or read book The Saddest Words William Faulkner s Civil War written by Michael Gorra and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, in this reconsideration of Faulkner's life and legacy. William Faulkner, one of America’s most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance—his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South—demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate’s life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon. Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions—and perhaps because of them—William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner’s biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was “the South’s curse and its separate destiny,” a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South’s revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a “Lost Cause” romanticism not only defined Faulkner’s twentieth century but now even our own age. Through Gorra’s critical lens, Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America’s history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, “was” and “again.” Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that “the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning.” Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra’s travels through the South—including Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi—and commentaries on Faulkner’s fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.

Download or read book Reading Faulkner Collected Stories written by and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers and critics, a guide to the Nobel Laureate's short stories

Download or read book Reading Faulkner written by Theresa M. Towner and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2006 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers and critics, a guide to the Nobel Laureate's short stories

Download or read book Natural Aristocracy written by Kevin Railey and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2012-06-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Railey uses a materialist critical approach to argue that Faulkner'sobsession with history and his struggle with specific ideologies affecting southern society and his family guided his development as an artist. Faulkner may have written himself into history in a way that satisfied the image he had of himself as a natural, artistic aristocrat.

Download or read book Absalom Absalom written by William Faulkner and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Absalom, Absalom!" by William Faulkner. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Download or read book Faulkner in the Twenty First Century written by Robert W. Hamblin and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-09-18 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Deborah N. Cohn, Leigh Anne Duck, Robert W. Hamblin, Michael Kreyling, Barbara Ladd, Walter Benn Michaels, Patrick O'Donnell, Theresa M. Towner, Annette Trefzer, and Karl F. Zender Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century presents the thoughts of ten noted Faulkner scholars who spoke at the twenty-seventh annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi. Theresa M. Towner attacks the traditional classification of Faulkner's works as “major” and “minor” and argues that this causes the neglect of other significant works and characters. Michael Kreyling uses photographs of Faulkner to analyze the interrelationships of Faulkner's texts with the politics and culture of Mississippi. Barbara Ladd and Deborah Cohn invoke the relevance of Faulkner's works to “the other South,” postcolonial Latin America. Also, approaching Faulkner from a postcolonial perspective, Annette Trefzer looks at his contradictory treatment of Native Americans. Within the tragic fates of such characters as Quentin Compson, Gail Hightower, and Rosa Coldfield, Leigh Ann Duck finds an inability to cope with painful memories. Patrick O'Donnell examines the use of the future tense and Faulkner's growing skepticism of history as a linear progression. To postmodern critics who denigrate “The Fire and the Hearth,” Karl F. Zender offers a rebuttal. Walter Benn Michaels contends that in Faulkner's South, and indeed the United States as a whole, the question of racial identification tends to overpower all other issues. Faulkner's recurring interest in frontier life and values inspires Robert W. Hamblin's piece.

Download or read book The Wishing Tree written by William Faulkner and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A strange boy with red hair leads a birthday-girl and her companions on a hunt for the wishing tree which brings them many suprising and magical adventures.

Download or read book Policing Intimacy written by Jenna Grace Sciuto and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature, author Jenna Grace Sciuto analyzes literary depictions of sexual policing of the color line across multiple spaces with diverse colonial histories: Mississippi through William Faulkner’s work, Louisiana through Ernest Gaines’s novels, Haiti through the work of Marie Chauvet and Edwidge Danticat, and the Dominican Republic through writing by Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario. This literature exposes the continuing coloniality that links depictions of US democracy with Caribbean dictatorships in the twentieth century, revealing a set of interrelated features characterizing the transformation of colonial forms of racial and sexual control into neocolonial reconfigurations. A result of systemic inequality and large-scale historical events, the patterns explored herein reveal the ways in which private relations can reflect national occurrences and the intimate can be brought under public scrutiny. Acknowledging the widespread effects of racial and sexual policing that persist in current legal, economic, and political infrastructures across the circum-Caribbean can in turn bring to light permutations of resistance to the violent discriminations of the status quo. By drawing on colonial documents, such as early law systems like the 1685 French Code Noir instated in Haiti, the 1724 Code Noir in Louisiana, and the 1865 Black Code in Mississippi, in tandem with examples from twentieth-century literature, Policing Intimacy humanizes the effects of legal histories and leaves space for local particularities. By focusing on literary texts and variances in form and aesthetics, Sciuto demonstrates the necessity of incorporating multiple stories, histories, and traumas into accounts of the past.

Download or read book The Color of the Law written by Gail Williams O'Brien and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On February 25, 1946, African Americans in Columbia, Tennessee, averted the lynching of James Stephenson, a nineteen-year-old, black Navy veteran accused of attacking a white radio repairman at a local department store. That night, after Stephenson was safely out of town, four of Columbia's police officers were shot and wounded when they tried to enter the town's black business district. The next morning, the Tennessee Highway Patrol invaded the district, wrecking establishments and beating men as they arrested them. By day's end, more than one hundred African Americans had been jailed. Two days later, highway patrolmen killed two of the arrestees while they were awaiting release from jail. Drawing on oral interviews and a rich array of written sources, Gail Williams O'Brien tells the dramatic story of the Columbia "race riot," the national attention it drew, and its surprising legal aftermath. In the process, she illuminates the effects of World War II on race relations and the criminal justice system in the United States. O'Brien argues that the Columbia events are emblematic of a nationwide shift during the 1940s from mob violence against African Americans to increased confrontations between blacks and the police and courts. As such, they reveal the history behind such contemporary conflicts as the Rodney King and O. J. Simpson cases.

Download or read book Becoming Faulkner written by Philip Weinstein and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2010 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the celebrated American novelist explores how the events of Faulkner's life and his personal struggles influenced the direction and nature of his writings.

Download or read book The Campus Color Line written by Eddie R. Cole and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Although it is commonly known that college students and other activists, as well as politicians, actively participated in the fight for and against civil rights in the middle decades of the twentieth century, historical accounts have not adequately focused on the roles that the nation's college presidents played in the debates concerning racism. Focusing on the period between 1948 and 1968, The Campus Color Line sheds light on the important place of college presidents in the struggle for racial parity. College presidents, during a time of violence and unrest, initiated and shaped racial policies and practices inside and outside of the educational sphere. The Campus Color Line illuminates how the legacy of academic leaders' actions continues to influence the unfinished struggle for Black freedom and racial equity in education and beyond."--

Download or read book Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas written by Jay Watson and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2016-05-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Thadious M. Davis, Matthew Dischinger, Dotty Dye, Chiyuma Elliott, Doreen Fowler, Joseph Fruscione, T. Austin Graham, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Derrick Harriell, Lisa Hinrichsen, Randall Horton, George Hutchinson, Andrew B. Leiter, John Wharton Lowe, Jamaal May, Ben Robbins, Tim A. Ryan, Sharon Eve Sarthou, Jenna Sciuto, James Smethurst, and Jay Watson At the turn of the millennium, the Martinican novelist Édouard Glissant offered the bold prediction that "Faulkner's oeuvre will be made complete when it is revisited and made vital by African Americans," a goal that "will be achieved by a radically 'other' reading." In the spirit of Glissant's prediction, this collection places William Faulkner's literary oeuvre in dialogue with a hemispheric canon of black writing from the United States and the Caribbean. The volume's seventeen essays and poetry selections chart lines of engagement, dialogue, and reciprocal resonance between Faulkner and his black precursors, contemporaries, and successors in the Americas. Contributors place Faulkner's work in illuminating conversation with writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Randall Kenan, Edward P. Jones, and Natasha Trethewey, along with the musical artistry of Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton. In addition, five contemporary African American poets offer their own creative responses to Faulkner's writings, characters, verbal art, and historical example. In these ways, the volume develops a comparative approach to the Faulkner oeuvre that goes beyond the compelling but limiting question of influence--who read whom, whose works draw from whose--to explore the confluences between Faulkner and black writing in the hemisphere.