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This chapter examines textuality and authority in William Faulkner’s novel Light in August, focusing on the body, especially the abject body. It begins with an analysis of Doane’s Mill as a desolate industrial wasteland that foreshadows the abject or “disposable” human environment addressed in the novel, and the characters who attempt to resist this economy of waste. The chapter suggests that Light in August “takes on the difficult question of how some humans attempt to dispose of others” because they may be seen as either “inconsequential” or “different.” It then outlines an “epistemology of the visual” and its potential for a “social reformation for the eye,” including the reader’s eye. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ concept of the “agent of blindness,” the chapter argues that Faulkner “challenges and questions ways of interpreting people, places, and events based on sight,” while using film techniques to “intensify the effects of his novel’s specularity.”

This chapter examines the notion of context by comparing William Faulkner’s novel Light in August (1932) with Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), and argues that the two authors have more in common than one might assume. More specifically, it considers how reading Faulkner alongside Larsen may help to resituate the former’s “Southern” writing about race in wider national and transnational contexts. The chapter also discusses a notion of intertextuality that leans on Roland Barthes’ reading of every text as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.” It suggests that both novels interrogate racial ideology in America, particularly the “one drop rule” that originated in the South, and furthermore, looks at the characters’ adoption of an understanding of racial identity that defines them as “black.”

The Mansion reflected the saving force in the South that shows the innate goodness in white people of all classes. This optimism was not present in The Sound and the Fury, where the only saving grace was Dilsey. Light in August, on the other hand, gave the readers an idea of optimism amidst the land of desolation. Faulkner seemed contented when he wrote Light in August. The main character in The Wild Palms found peace in the Parchman penitentiary. Faulkner ended the Snopes trilogy while he was in Virginia. This was when the “the Greenfiled phase” of his work ended. He then began to write The Reivers. This work was a pulling back of the idea that the plain whites were going to save Southern humanity. The main character was Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Priest. In his last years, Faulkner believed that there was an internal being in the end. During this time, he ended the Snopes trilogy.

This essay by Aaron Nyerges takes a particularly philosophical approach to Faulkner’s depiction of characterization, above all in his novel Light in August. He shows how Joe Christmas’s seeming “automatism” follows from Faulkner’s efforts to bring together cinema’s technology, his awareness of race, and the South’s social strictures. The result is a powerful description of Joe’s “cinematic” identity, one defined more by incompletion or becoming rather than any stable cultural or racial grounding. The essay looks at classic film genres such as the Western as well as properties of literary modernism to show how cinematic workings informed Faulkner’s depiction of a radical ontological strain on Joe’s identity.

William Faulkner’s imagined small county in Mississippi has grown to represent the US South and the racial turmoil of generations imbricated in the long legacy of slavery. But in the last few decades, not only have Faulkner and Southern studies looked more at diverse and global interpretations of Faulkner, but the Mississippi Delta Chinese population has become an important part of the study of racialization in the South. This chapter particularly examines the historical and literary role that the Chinese play as parties neither black nor white. The interstitial positioning of the Chinese American population parallels the skillful use of foreignness and outsiderness in Faulkner’s works, most particularly in Light in August, in which the ambiguously raced protagonist exists as a foreigner until he irretrievably falls within the racial binary. Faulkner makes use of the Chinese at pivotal moments to discuss the intrusion and socioeconomic containment of a foreign presence, which his characters see will lead to a mixed-race future.

This chapter explores how the act of cinema-going in the racially organized and coded space of the southern Jim Crow movie house worked to construct and consolidate a white racial identity for economically and/or spatially peripheral whites sampling the new goods, services, and pleasures available in modernizing, urbanizing environments. Drawing on recent scholarship on the social history of film viewership in the segregation-era South, it looks at the connections between white film spectatorship and the racializing activity of “consuming” racial violence in the form of spectacle lynching. The chapter examines these connections in William Faulkner’s fictions such as “Dry September” and Light in August in the context of viewership that is simultaneously inside and outside the operation of normative whiteness in Yoknapatawpha.

This paper discusses the connections between Faulkner’s work and what Américo Paredes called “Greater Mexico” encompassing national Mexico and the US Southwest. It argues that the genesis and thematics of this work cannot be fully understood without an extended consideration of the South’s relationship to this latter area by way of the US-Mexico War but also as a result of subsequent Mexican immigration to the US South. The essay gives special attention to Light in August but also considers the influence of Faulkner on later writers of Greater Mexico such as Cormac McCarthy.

This chapter explores the issue of police brutality Faulkner's seventh novel, Light in August. The novel locates the violent questioning of an African American detainee by the Yoknapatawpha County sheriff and his deputies within a national debate over custodial interrogation tactics that arose in the years after World War I, which became “a staple in American popular culture” as Faulkner was reaching maturity as a novelist. It shows that “the third degree,” as it came to be called, could be found not only in the legal and penal spaces of the Jim Crow South but also in the nation's metropolitan police departments. Faulkner demonstrates how “the difficulty of knowing, the indeterminacy of truth, and the ambiguity of identity” work to elicit and to compound the racialized violence of Light in August.

This chapter explores whiteness as a racial formation in William Faulkner’s novel Light in August in the context of the post-Reconstruction period in the South. It looks at the postbellum enfranchisement of African American men and how racial blackness underwent a cultural miscegenation by acquiring some of the rights and properties of white manhood, resulting in a crisis of confidence for white masculinity. The chapter argues that the main protagonist in Light in August, Joe Christmas, represents Faulkner’s meditation on the civic equality of black men during the period and its effect on the psyche of white men. It also considers the threat posed by all black men to the racial order after they had been given the vote and the legal position as head of their families, and how this threat relates to homoeroticism.

This chapter contains Vladimir Nabokov's letter to Edmund Wilson, in which he criticized William Faulkner's novel Light in August that was sent to him by Wilson. In his letter, dated November 21, 1948, Nabokov expresses his dislike of Faulkner's work. In particular, Nabokov says he detests Faulkner's romanticism and claims that he can only explain the latter's popularity in France by the fact that all the popular mediocre writers in the country in recent years have also had their fling at l'homme marchait, la nuit était sombre [the man was walking, the night was dark]. According to Nabokov, Light in August is one of the tritest and most tedious examples of a trite and tedious genre.

This chapter is aimed as an obituary of William Faulkner. It describes Faulkner as an arrogant and ill-mannered individual in a way that is peculiarly “Southern”: in company he usually failed to reply when spoken to, or when he spoke there was something grandiose in the profusion with which he sprinkled his remarks with “Sirs” and “Ma'ms.” No matter how great a writer he may be, the public gets increasingly tired of Faulkner; his death seems to remove the obligation to read him. Nevertheless, the chapter regards Faulkner as the greatest American novelist after Henry James since the 1930s. It cites five masterpieces written by Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and The Hamlet.

This chapter focuses on the defrocked minister Gail Hightower in William Faulkner’s novel Light in August as “the divided, repressed psyche of closeted gay whiteness in the Jim Crow South.” Doubly marked by failed performances of normative whiteness and compulsory heterosexuality, Hightower offers a useful way of reading and interpreting U.S. southern literature in general and Faulkner’s fiction in particular. The chapter examines “the pathogenic nucleus of Hightower’s suffering” and the psychoanalytic aspects of his subject formation. It looks at the Civil War frock coat of Hightower’s father and its significance, and argues that lapses in white racial normativity as well as lapses in heteronormativity go hand in hand at every stage of Hightower’s life and every level of his psyche.

This chapter explores the historical development of new forms of military defense in the early twentieth century, such as the National Guard, and how this process was explicitly racialized in the Jim Crow South. It looks at the National Guard’s emergence in the figure of Percy Grimm in William Faulkner’s 1932 novel Light in August, focusing on its “promise of militarized modernization” reserved almost exclusively for white men, and how it “assisted in disciplining and federalizing a whiteness that belonged to the masses...and thus resignified local or regional whiteness as the official domain of the U.S. military.” The chapter considers how Faulkner critically “reimagines whiteness as tied to the horror of state-based violence” in modern America by showing the National Guard’s collapse into its ostensible opposite, the lynch mob.

This chapter explores the relationship between William Faulkner and the world culture of the “global South.” It begins by discussing the relevance of a trans-American context to many of Faulkner's novels and his participation in transnational crossings. It then considers the trans-Atlantic aspects of modernism, the links between modernisms and modernists in the Americas, and Faulkner's connection with the issues of coloniality and postcoloniality. It also examines Latin America's underdevelopment and dependency using dependency theory, along with Faulkner's focus on the dependency of the South to the processes of modernization. Finally, the chapter analyzes three of Faulkner's works: The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936).

In this chapter, John Crowe Ransom offers an impression of William Faulkner's achievement, an impression that he says has not changed much during the years that followed his reading of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August. According to Ransom, these three early novels are proof of the narrative power and the detailed poetry of Faulkner's creations. He argues that Faulkner's books are unequal, and that the style is less than consistently sustained. Faulkner is therefore not Ben Jonson, he is not even William Shakespeare; he is John Webster. The chapter concludes with the opinion that there are imperfections in Faulkner's work, but that his perfections are wonderful, well sustained, and without exact precedent anywhere.

This chapter discusses the work of William Faulkner, describing him as a man of genius, although a willfully and perversely chaotic one. Faulkner was born in Oxford, Mississippi; in his vast work the provincial and dusty town, surrounded by the shanties of poor whites and Negroes, is the center of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. During World War I, Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He then became a poet, a journalist connected with New Orleans publications, and the author of famous novels and movie scenarios. In 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Faulkner represents in American letters that feudal and agrarian South which lost in the Civil War. Among his works are The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Intruder in the Dust.

This chapter first provides an introductory explanation for the quotation from William Faulkner's Light in August. It then provides a quotation from one of Charles Dickens' Christmas stories, “The Haunted Man” (1848).

Chapter 5 examines Faulkner’s engagement with eugenics discourse as that Progressive-era reform movement began making inroads into the South in the twenties and thirties. Eugenics was riddled with contradictions: in addressing itself to the purification of modern whiteness, it ironically divided whiteness against itself, positing deviant, degenerate forms that supposedly sapped the vitality of the nation’s economy and racial stock—a problem with distressing implications for the strict biracial order of Jim Crow. In his first five Yoknapatawpha County novels along with the early Snopes narrative “Father Abraham,” Faulkner appropriates many of the signature features of eugenics discourse—its fondness for elaborate genealogies, its use of the family-study genre, its rhetorical framing of heredity as problem or doom, its concept of “feeblemindedness” and emphasis on the compulsory segregation and sterilization of the unfit—in ways that by turns collude in and powerfully critique the guiding assumptions of the movement.

This chapter contains a number of journal entries, written between April 10, 1940 and November 6, 1949. In them, Thornton Wilder talks about three of William Faulkner's novels: Light in August, The Hamlet, and Absalom, Absalom!. Wilder first comments on Light in August, the climax of which is the castration of the half-Negro demon-hero Joe Christmas. According to Wilder, Faulkner represents the humiliation of the once gallant South in sexual terms; the Negro's strength is perpetually before their eyes to remind them of their loss. He then turns to what he believes is Faulkner's fancy overwriting in The Hamlet before concluding with a discussion of Absalom, Absalom! and its motif that the institution of slavery set in motion its own retribution.