A bold book, built of close readings, striking in its range and depth, The Signifying Eye shows Faulkner's art take shape in sweeping arcs of social, labor, and aesthetic history. Beginning with long-unpublished works (his childhood sketches and his hand-drawn and handillustrated play The Marionettes) and early novels (Mosquitoes and Sartoris), working through many major works (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!), and including more popular fictions (The Wild Palms and The Unvanquished) and late novels (notably Intruder in the Dust and The Town), The Signifying Eye reveals Faulkner's visual obsessions with artistic creation as his work is read next to Wharton, Cather, Toomer, and—in a tour de force intervention—Willem de Kooning. After coloring in southern literature as a "reverse slave narrative," Waid's Eye locates Faulkner's fiction as the "feminist hinge" in a crucial parable of art that seeks abstraction through the burial of the race-defined mother. Race is seen through gender and sexuality while social fall is exposed (in Waid's phrase) as a "coloring of class." Locating "visual language" that constitutes a "pictorial vocabulary," The Signifying Eye delights in literacy as the oral meets the written and the abstract opens as a site to see narrative. Steeped in history, this book locates a heightened reality that goes beyond representation to bring Faulkner's novels, stories, and drawings into visible form through Whistler, Beardsley, Gorky, and de Kooning. Visionary and revisionist, Waid has painted the proverbial big picture, changing the fundamental way that both the making of modernism and the avant-garde will be seen. A Friends Fund publication

To say that the entirety of human experience can be a novelist’s theme is to voice an absurdity. But, as Peter Swiggart convincingly argues, Faulkner’s work can be viewed as an extraordinary attempt to transform the panorama of man’s social experience into thematic material. Faulkner’s two-dimensional characters, his rhetorical circumlocutions, and his technical experiments are efforts to achieve a dramatic focus upon material too unwieldy, at least in principle, for any kind of fictional condensation. Faulkner makes use of devices of stylization that apply to virtually every aspect of his successful novels. For example, the complex facts of Southern history and culture are reduced to the scale of a simplified and yet grandiose social mythology: the degeneration of the white aristocracy, the rise of Snopesism, and the white Southerner’s gradual recognition of his latent sense of racial guilt. Within Faulkner’s fictional universe, human psychology takes the form of absolute distinctions between puritan and nonpuritan characters, between individuals corrupted by moral rationality and those who are simultaneously free of moral corruption and social involvement. In this way Faulkner is able to create the impression of a comprehensive treatment of important social concerns and universal moral issues. Like Henry James, he makes as much as he can of clearly defined dramatic events, until they seem to echo the potential complexity and depth of situations outside the realm of fiction. When this technique is successful the reader is left with the impression that he knows a Faulkner character far better than he could know an actual person. At the same time, the character retains the atmosphere of complexity and mystery imposed upon it by Faulkner’s handling of style and structure. This method of characterization reflects Faulkner’s simplifications of experience and yet suggests the inadequacy of any rigid interpretation of actual behavior. The reader is supplied with special eyeglasses through which the tragedy of the South, as well as humanity’s general inhumanity to itself, can be viewed in a perspective of simultaneous mystery and symbolic clarity.

Think and Grow Through Art & Music is written for anyone who aspires to be or become a professional in the field of art and music. The Author's extensive experience has demonstrated that a person who possesses the burning desire to become a professional in the field of art and music, and not only reads, yet also applied these principles, will multiply his/her greater advantage of becoming successful by ten times or more. Just as Napoleon Hill made millionaires out of scores of men and women in the past, as well as today, his principles when properly applied and followed by action, will work with any application. The author: • Includes his Twenty plus years of face-to-face interviews with some of the greatest artists and musicians who have ever lived. He also includes email and telephone conversations from those too busy to sit down for a one on one. • Adds his countless hours of research delving into the past of those who have gone before, so he might add their input and suggestions. • Integrates Napoleon Hills’ lifetime of knowledge gained by over 500 interviews with some of Americas renowned leaders used to create his science of personal success and philosophy outlined in his classic Think & Grow Rich. • Teamed up with the Napoleon Hill Foundation in Wise, Virginia, who has carried on Napoleon’s work since his passing in 1970. Together they have clearly written a modern day classic, a must read for any & all. Over 20 years of interviews and research, yielding inspiration, advice and motivation from musicians and artists too numerous to list, including: Chet Atkins, Les Paul, B.B. King, Stevie Wonder, Jerry Garcia, Chet Baker, Martina McBride, Thelonious Monk, Leonard Cohen, Sheryl Crow, Pharrell Williams, Andrea Bocelli, Bruno Mars, Mick Jones, Beyoncé, Willie Nelson, Eric Clapton, Eminem, Madonna, John Mellencamp, Enrico Caruso, Taylor Swift, Lyle Lovett, Diana Ross, Naomi Judd, Paul McCartney, Aretha Franklin, Carole King, Mary J. Blige, Jimmy Buffet, Chaka Khan, Quincy Jones, Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Ringo Starr and more. Faulkner firmly believes that the only limitations the reader has, are those he or she set up in their own minds. By following these principles and taking action, the reader will remain persistent, not give up, and have doors open that otherwise they would never be aware of.

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