Writing Again the Life of William Faulkner

American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the most compelling manifestations of America’s troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic’s founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane, and directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick, present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in their characters’ racial understanding, an obtuseness or naivety that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with—and implicitly critical of—the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. The book thus restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white, bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty.

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Lothar Hönnighausen, William Faulkner: The Art of Stylization in his Early Graphic and Literary Work (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987, £27.50). Pp. 215. ISBN 0 521 33280 X

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021875800004199 ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 23 (3) ◽

pp. 471-472

Author(s):

Mick Gidley

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

William Faulkner ◽

Literary Work ◽

Cambridge University

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Lifespan change in grammaticalisation as frequency-sensitive automation: William Faulkner and the let alone construction

Cognitive Linguistics ◽

10.1515/cog-2019-0020 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 31 (2) ◽

pp. 339-365

Author(s):

Jakob Neels

Keyword(s):

Individual Differences ◽

William Faulkner ◽

Added Value ◽

Feeding Cycle ◽

Usage Patterns ◽

Cognitive Automation ◽

Community Data ◽

Syntactic Context

AbstractThis paper explores the added value of studying intra- and inter-speaker variation in grammaticalisation based on idiolect corpora. It analyses the usage patterns of the English let alone construction in a self-compiled William Faulkner corpus against the backdrop of aggregated community data. Vast individual differences (early Faulkner vs. late Faulkner vs. peers) in frequencies of use are observed, and these frequency differences correlate with different degrees of grammaticalisation as measured in terms of host-class and syntactic context expansion. The corpus findings inform general issues in current cognitive-functional research, such as the from-corpus-to-cognition issue and the cause/consequence issue of frequency. They lend support to the usage-based view of grammaticalisation as a lifelong, frequency-sensitive process of cognitive automation. To substantiate this view, this paper proposes a self-feeding cycle of constructional generalisation that is driven by the interplay of frequency, entrenchment, partial sanction and habituation.

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