Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture

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 to 1950. 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 links the story cycle The Unvanquished to the battle over interpretations of American history; Faulkner’s detective fiction of the early 1930s to the emerging schism in the legal realm; Absalom, Absalomi to the Wagner Act of 1935 as well as to contract disputes in the South and in the film studios of Hollywood; and The Hamlet to the development of the ethnographic method in the field of anthropology. A fascinating analysis of the filming of Intruder in the Dust in Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford concludes his study. Through keen interpretive readings, Hannon reveals that Faulkner - who often seemed to be detached from influence - was intensely attentive to ideas of his time.