‘They Worship Death Here’: William Faulkner, Sanctuary and Hollywood

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Gray
Keyword(s):  
William Faulkner ◽  
Howard Hawks

This lecture discusses William Faulkner's experiences in Hollywood, which he described as a place that worships death and not money. It shows that nearly all of his experiences in Hollywood were bad, but were eventually redeemed in part by friendships, most notably with director Howard Hawks. Faulkner also had a passionate affair with Meta Carpenter, Hawks' script clerk. Faulkner is shown to have never fully settled down or felt secure in Hollywood, and eventually things became worse for him as time went on. However, Faulkner was able to recognise the determining significance of Hollywood in his time and culture, and subsequently penned a number of novels and written works, including The Wild Palms. The lecture examines several of Faulkner's works that were written during his stay in Hollywood, most particularly Sanctuary, a notorious and controversial novel during that time.

American Obscurantism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lurie
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Hart Crane ◽  
Stanley Kubrick ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Racial History ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Ongoing Development

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.

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

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.

William Faulkner and the Negro Problem

1949 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 153
Author(s):  
Charles I. Glicksberg
Keyword(s):  
William Faulkner ◽  
Negro Problem

William Faulkner: Early Poetry and Prose

Books Abroad ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 210
Author(s):  
Irving Malin ◽  
Carvel Collins
Keyword(s):  
William Faulkner
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