Reading Faulknerian Tragedy / / Warwick Wadlington.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Wadlington, Warwick,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1987
• Rok vydání: 2019
• Jazyk: English
• Fyzický popis: 1 online resource (272 p.)

"This could be the best Faulkner study of the decade, the counterpart of Vickery in the 50s and Brooks in the 60s. It is ambitious,powerfully well-informed, and quite as pathbreaking in its approach as one would expect from the author of The Confidence Game in American Literature." -Gary Lee Stonum, Department of English, Case Western Reserve University Reading Faulknerian Tragedy illuminates theories of reading and of tragedy as it poses new questions in respect to four of Faulkner's major novels. Drawing on the work of the literary theorists Kenneth Burke and Mikhail Bakhtin and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Warwick Wadlington gives a coherent account of the aesthetics of Faulkner's tragedy and advocates a model of reading based not on interpretation but on performance. Faulkner's voice, he asserts, functions as an invitation to readers to assume roles, become speakers and thus listeners, and so in a sense complete the text they are reading, and to take pleasure in or suffer the consequences of their role-taking.Offering an "anthropology of rhetoric," Wadlington examines the cultural contexts of Faulkner's writing and describes a kind of tragedy springing from the possibilities of heroic existence in a culture that stresses honor and shame. He defines tragedy as part of a historical, genealogical process, and locates the reading and writing of tragedy within the distinctly human opposition to personal mortality. In his view, reading epitomizes the performance of the scripts of culture itself, and it is one of the cultural activities that constitute persons by furnishing them with the very power to exist. Wadlington offers detailed analyses of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!Rich and provocative in its implications for literary theorists as well as for Faulknerians, the book will also be welcomed by specialists and students of twentieth-century American literature and the novel.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: On Saying No to Death -- CHAPTER 1. Reading and Performance: Reproduction and Persons -- CHAPTER 2. Faulkner and the Tragic Potentials of Honor and Shame -- CHAPTER 3. A Logic of Tragedy: The Sound and the Fury -- CHAPTER 4. Voice as Hero: As I Lay Dying and the Mortuary Trilogy -- CHAPTER 5. Rest in Peace: The Promise and End of Light in August -- CHAPTER 6. The House of Absalorn, Absalom!: Voices, Daughters, and the Question of Catharsis -- Appendix A. Some Limitations of Deconstructive "Reading" -- Appendix B. Studying Actual Readers -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index