The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

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Male Subjectivity at the Margins

Faulkner on the Mississippi: Popular Currents of Realism in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

Situated in recent scholarship on interiors and architecture in modernist fiction, "Doorways to Being" explores ways in which the modernist novel proposes a phenomenological engagement with the material environment, specifically the body in relation to transitional architectures. The study of thresholds in select modern fiction seeks to answer the essential question of how and why we move in the constructed world from the perspective of phenomenology and cultural studies. This comparative and interdisciplinary dissertation demonstrates how modernist fiction reestablishes the primacy of the sensed physical world in the spirit of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The introduction theorizes the threshold or doorway as thing, object, and contributor to the ideologies of architectural systemacity. The following three chapters respectively study William Faulkner’s enveloping thresholds in Sanctuary, ecstatic thresholds in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, and elevators and the mechanized body in Franz Kafka's Amerika. The fourth and final chapter compares select works by James Joyce and Colm Tóibín, examining the impact of postmodern aesthetics on contemporary architectural narration and national identity. The conclusion extends the phenomenology of architecture in fiction to the realm of modernist cinema, illustrating concepts and techniques of phenomenological film extrapolated from the writings of Walter Benjamin and Merleau-Ponty.

https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1604&context=oa_diss

Doorways to Being: Modernism and 'Lived' Architectures

According to America’s literary modernism, the line between local community and mass society is so faint that the attempt to draw it draws it into question. In the years between the wars, small rural communities were being increasingly socialised by mass media and mass mobility. Following a theory of community advanced by Jean-Luc Nancy, this thesis abandons the mythic view of community as an autonomous ideal destroyed by the geography of mass society. By extension, it cautions against depicting regional modernism as a reaction to a lost order, as an attempt to integrate social fragmentation, or as a lament over community's dissolution in an atomised marketplace. Instead, America's regional modernism offers a unique poetics of resistance, an aesthetics that controverts any political design for a self-contained community. As it registers the effects of automatic motion and mechanical media in verbal consciousness, modernism undoes the notion that communities were sustained by shared identity, ontological integrity or physical

A Geography of Resistance

William Faulkner occupied a unique position as a modern writer. Although famous for his modernist novels and their notorious difficulty, he also wrote extensively for the "culture industry," and the works he produced for it-including short stories, adaptations, and screenplays-bore many of the hallmarks of consumer art. His experiences as a Hollywood screenwriter influenced him in a number of ways, many of them negative, while the films turned out by the "dream factories" in which he labored sporadically inspired both his interest and his contempt. Faulkner also disparaged the popular magazines-though he frequently sold short stories to them. To what extent was Faulkner's deeply ambivalent relationship to-and involvement with-American popular culture reflected in his modernist or "art" fiction? Peter Lurie finds convincing evidence that Faulkner was keenly aware of commercial culture and adapted its formulae, strategies, and in particular, its visual techniques into the language of his novels of the 1930s. Lurie contends that Faulkner's modernism can be best understood in light of his reaction to the popular culture of his day. Using Theodor Adorno's theory about modern cultural production as a framework, Lurie's close readings of Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem uncover the cultural history that surrounded and influenced the development of Faulkner's art. Lurie is particularly interested in the influence of cinema on Faulkner's fiction and especially the visual strategies he both deployed and critiqued. These include the suggestion of cinematic viewing on the part of readers and of characters in each of the novels; the collective and individual acts of voyeurism in Sanctuary and Light in August; the exposing in Absalom! Absalom! and Light in Augustof stereotypical and cinematic patterns of thought about history and race; and the evocation of popular forms like melodrama and the movie screen in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Offering innovative readings of these canonical works, this study sheds new light on Faulkner's uniquely American modernism.

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Vision's Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination

This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the English at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact scholarshiprepository@richmond.edu. Recommended Citation Lurie, Peter. \"A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1939–1945 by Stuart Burrows (review).\" Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 4 (2013): 866-68. doi:10.1353/mfs.2013.0058. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

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A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1939–1945 by Stuart Burrows (review)

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Querying the Modernist Canon: Historical Consciousness and the Sexuality of Suffering in Faulkner and Hart Crane

Considering that he worked a stint as a screen writer, it will come as little surprise that Faulkner has often been called the most cinematic of novelists. Faulkner's novels were produced in the same high period as the films of classical Hollywood, a reason itself for considering his work alongside this dominant form. Beyond their era, though, Faulkner's novels--or the ways in which they ask readers to see as well as feel his world--have much in common with film. That Faulkner was aware of film and that his novels' own ""thinking"" betrays his profound sense of the medium and its effects broadens the contexts in which he can be considered. In a range of approaches, the contributors consider Faulkner's career as a scenarist and collaborator in Hollywood, the ways his screenplay work and the adaptations of his fiction informed his literary writing, and how Faulkner's craft anticipates, intersects with, or reflects upon changes in cultural history across the lifespan of cinema. Drawing on film history, critical theory, archival studies of Faulkner's screenplays and scholarship about his work in Hollywood, the nine essays show a keen awareness of literary modernism and its relation to film.

Faulkner and Film

IN APRIL OF 1935, the Eastman-Kodak company released what would become the most widely recognized color film stock in the world. At the time, Kodachrome was marketed with the burgeoning mass of amateur photographers in mind, a group who would benefit especially from Kodachrome's flexibility and use in what were already popular roll-film cameras. These included the Leica, a German-made "minicamera" that became an enormously successful part of the amateur photo business, even during the early years of the Depression (and notwithstanding its cost). (1) These cameras also played a role in the development in the middle 1930s of the picture magazines, most notably Look and Life, publications that, as cultural historians have amply demonstrated, played a key role in the development of a genuinely national identity and a commensurate emphasis on seeing. (2) As the Kodak corporation knew, and practitioners of the new stock soon learned, Kodachrome also produced the greatest resolution and duration of any color film that had appeared before it--and practically since. This remained true about Kodachrome until 1990, when Fuji introduced its Process e-6 Fujichrome, the first color film stock considered to have a sharper resolution and finer grain than Kodachrome. In fact, Kodachrome's color-retention was so fine that the company kept this fact a secret into the 1970s for concern that consumers would not buy the other versions of color film that Kodak also developed in the thirties, such as Ektachrome and Kodacolor. (3) Following its presentation to a mass market, Kodachrome also quickly became the color stock of choice among professional photographers and journalists. Els Rijper has gathered some of the most (literally) indelible of these images from the historical period bracketing World War II in his book, Kodachrome. More immediately, however, Kodachrome also became widely used by advertisers who wished, understandably, to exploit the stock's deep saturation and capacities for retinal agitation (and attendant potential for erotic cathexis) on their target buyers. In the same year that Kodachrome appeared, William Faulkner published his nocturnal, and thus not especially colorful or saturated novel, Pylon. He had set aside writing Absalom, Absalom! (1936) in this period because, Faulkner claimed, he needed to clarify his thinking about this longer, if not also more ambitious work. Ambitious in its scale and length, as well as in its efforts--new to Faulkner at this point in his career--to engage directly the origins and legacies of Southern history. Prior to these works, Faulkner had published Sartoris, his first Yoknapatawpha novel that, like others set in his fictional county, was concerned with the history of Southern families like the Sartorises. Yet the book that became Flags in the Dust does not train the same critical and questioning eye on the role in Southern history of race and slavery as do Faulkner's later and major works such as Absalom, Go Down, Moses (1942), or, before them, Light in August (1932), Faulkner's first novel specifically about race. Like those published just before it, Sanctuary (1931), As I Lay Dying (1930), and The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August treated a time period that was roughly contemporaneous to the period of its composition. These facts about the production of Faulkner's major fiction are familiar to nearly all of his readers. What may be less well known, however, is the consonance they have with the introduction of the first widely disseminated color transparency film. Important to this trajectory is the move to what becomes Faulkner's overtly sociohistorical fiction, the difference between what critics have often recognized as Faulkner's formalist-aestheticist modernism in his earlier novels and his more historical fiction in works from the middle 1930s. Part of this development included a shift in representational practice on Faulkner's part, one that moved from a highly colorful pattern of description in novels like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, and that preceded Kodachrome, to a method that resembled the formal and chromatic properties of an arguably more historical photographic mode. …

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Peter Lurie

Papers

Vision's Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination

A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1939–1945 by Stuart Burrows (review)

Querying the Modernist Canon: Historical Consciousness and the Sexuality of Suffering in Faulkner and Hart Crane

Faulkner and Film

Faulkner's Literary Historiography: Color, Photography, and the Accessible Past