Racial Debts, Individual Slights, and Sleights of Hand in Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust

William Faulkner's novel Intruder in the Dust (1948) thematizes racial debt as a form of racial reparations. Racial debt and its repayment emerge as the white boy Chick Mallison's obsession with defining and ridding himself of a debt he owes Lucas Beauchamp, a black man. When a lynch mob threatens Lucas, it becomes Chick's responsibility to save his life. Guided by Lucas in how to do so, Chick learns about cross-racial family ties and the collective profits and debts of history. Contemporary civil rights and anti-lynching movements, the actual lynching of Ellwood Higginbotham, as well as the shooting of the film version of Intruder in Faulkner's own Oxford, Mississippi in 1949 amplify the novel's debt and reparations theme. Despite publisher and studio warnings, Faulkner and director Clarence Brown render lynching central to Intruder's story while Kauffer's cover art encodes artists' resistance to censorship and marketing demands.

Faulkner’s Stores: Microfinance and Economic Power in the Postbellum South

After the Civil War, stores played a crucial role in the redevelopment of the South's economy. Landowner-merchants used crop liens, loans against the value of a crop, as contracts to bind laborers to the land through debt and dependency. The landowner-merchants provided food, seeds, fertilizer, and all of the other items necessary to live and raise a crop for a season, but they charged exorbitant interest on the items, and the cost of the charges was deducted from the value of their share of the crop. Faulkner depicts the stores as a system of coercive microfinance in several of his novels. In Absalom, Absalom, Thomas Sutpen opens a store when he returns from the war to rebuild his plantation. In The Hamlet, Flem Snopes uses Jody Varner's store as the vehicle for his social mobility, and in The Sound and the Fury, Jason Compson works in a store while investing in the cotton commodities market.

Mink Snopes’s Shavasana: Body, Relation, and Exchange in Faulkner’s Economies of Being

This chapter will argue for Faulkner's use of bodies, both living and dead, in complicating the historical transition from an economy of relation to an economy of exchange in the US South.Exploring both the corporeal ambiguity of characters like Thomas Sutpen, DarlBundren, Flem and Ike Snopes, as well as a general poetics of bodies across Faulkner's writings, where characters fall into a rhetorical or mythic assembly with the earth itself, what in yogic practice is often referred to as shavasanaor "corpse pose," this chapter will suggest that the bodies of Faulkner's fiction offer a different narrative of the post-1865 US South, as a place of precarity and possibility, where communities and individuals had to redefine and re-inhabit new modes of personhood, agency, and subjectivity in an emergent open market.

What Price a “Cheap Idea”?: Money, Sanctuary, and Its Intertexts

In declaring Sanctuary (1931) "a cheap idea," "deliberately conceived" to make money, Faulkner announced the novel's preoccupation with circulation ("Maybe 10,000 of them will buy it"). The essay focuses on how, in writing for money, Faulkner wrote through money, doing so when "more and more of the aspects of living are coming to be strained through the bars of a dollar sign" (Middletown, Robert and Helen Lynd [1929]). Following Marx's account of the logic of circulation, whereby the commodity (here, the novel), "thrown into the alchemist's retort of circulation," must "shape-shift," "changing its skin" in order to "transubstantiate" into price, the paper tracks how Faulkner explores the monetization not only of his subject (Temple Drake's rape and exchange) but of his self-conception as author.

Pictorialism, Prolixity, and Spatial Form in Faulkner’s Post-Hollywood Racial Imaginary

Faulkner's modernism founds its footing with his first great experimental novels and their use of interior monologue to meditate on Southern identity and the region's class ills.Following Sanctuary's 1931 publishing and the first studio contract it prompted, Faulkner's fiction altered, becoming more expansive and encompassing.This paper describes the broadened social and formal "scale" of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels and considers what role his encounter with the film medium played in this development.Faulkner's work had always betrayed his interest in pictorialism. Yet as several examples suggest, this tendency increased and broadened across his later career.This paper uses ideas from image theory such as W.J.T. Mitchell's "metapictures" to suggest a relationship between Faulkner's remunerations in Hollywood and the expanded lexical, syntactic, and formal workings-as well as the broadened historical and racial considerations-in his Post-Hollywood novels