A folklore of speed -- Affect and spatial dynamics in Flags in the dust and The sound and the fury -- Currents of consciousness; or, My mother is a graphophone -- The negative plate, or Absalom, Absalom! and The camera's voice

This book treats William Faulkner's major fiction--from Flags in the Dust through to Absalom, Absalom!--to a searching reappraisal under the spotlight of a media-historical inquiry. It proposes that Faulkner's inveterate attraction to the paradigms of romance was disciplined and masked by the recurrent use of metaphorical figures borrowed from the new media ecology. Faulkner dressed up his romance materials in the technological garb of radio, gramophony, photography, and cinema, along with the transportational networks of road and air that were being installed in the 1920s. His modernism emerges from a fraght but productive interplay between his anachronistic predilection for chivalric chichés and his extraordinarily knowledgeable interest in the most up-to-date media institutions and forms. Rather than see Faulkner as a divided author, who worked for money in the magazines and studios while producing his serious fiction in despite of their symbolic economies, this study demonstrates how profoundly his mature art was shot through with the figures and dynamics of the materials he publicly repudiated. The result is a richer and more nuanced understanding of the dialectics of his art.

A systematic approach to using currently available techniques of artificial intelligence to develop computer programs for commercial use. From basic concepts of knowledge engineering through managing a complete system. Schwartz (English, Montclair State College-NJ) asks: How was it possible for a writer, out-of-print and generally ignored in the early 1940s, to be proclaimed a literary genius in 1950? His research illuminates the process by which Faulkner was chosen to be revivified as an important American nationalist writer during the heating up of the Cold War. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

William Faulkner is Phil Stone's contribution to American literature, once remarked a mutual confidant of the Nobel laureate and the Oxford, Mississippi, attorney. Despite his friendship with the writer for nearly fifty years, Stone is generally regarded as a minor figure in Faulkner studies. In her biography Phil Stone of Oxford, Susan Snell offers the first complete critical assessment of Stone's role in the transformation of Billy Falkner, a promising but directionless young man, into William Faulkner, arguably the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century. In the first decades of their friendship, Stone served Faulkner in many ways--as mentor, muse, patron, editor, agent, and publicist. Later, Stone was among Faulkner's first biographers and was a source of archival, biographical, and critical information for such Faulkner scholars as James B. Meriwether and Carvel Collins. Ironically, the most intriguing aspect of Stone's relationship with Faulkner has until now been the least studied. Stone was one of Faulkner's principal character studies, and from his life came the raw material out of which Faulkner constructed a good part of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Stone's Ivy League education, his friendships with gamblers and prostitutes, his family's hunting excursions, even his family's antebellum mansion only begin to suggest the borrowings from Stone's life found in books ranging from The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses to the Snopes trilogy. Faulkner also appropriated Stone's personality and profession to mirror--and sometimes mask--his own insecurities. Such characters as Quentin Compson, Darl Bundren, Horace Benbow, and Gavin Stevens owe much to the author himself but also recall Stone in often subtle ways. The fraternal rivalries for their mother's love that consume Darl Bundren and Quentin Compson, for example, are based on Stone's own unhappy family life. Bundren's and Compson's mothers more closely resemble Stone's mother than Faulkner's. In Stone, Faulkner saw the Old South confronting its twentieth-century crucibles--the teeming, rapacious white lower classes; the Great Depression; and the first stirrings of the civil rights and women's movements. In the 1930s, Faulkner recurrently dealt with the region's decadence and the fall of old patriarchies like the Compson and Sartoris families. During these years, Faulkner's fortunes rose steadily as Stone's declined, but it is Stone's story--not his own--that he chose to tell. Snell says that in a sense Faulkner usurped Stone's place in the South's social order, building his reputation and acquiring real estate as personal and financial failures nearly overwhelmed Stone. Stone's transparent jealousy of Faulkner, personality flaws, and mental instability in his final years have engendered skepticism about his claims concerning the years he had spent "fooling with Bill." But, to hastily relegate Stone to the marginalia of Yoknapatawpha County, Snell suggests, is to leave untapped a rich source of information.Phil Stone of Oxford tells the tragic story of a talented, complex man, bred for power in the declining era of southern patriarchy, yet compelled to pursue the Muse vicariously.

This work looks closely at the relationship between William Faulkner and Memphis novelist Joan Williams. Their story is significant not only in its depth but also in the years of their primary involvement, 1949-1953--a period over which Faulkner won both the Nobel Prize and a National Book Award. This is the first book-length study of the Faulkner-Williams relationship, and the first truly attentive consideration of Joan Williams, her impressions of Faulkner, and her commitment to writing. Until now, Williams, an acclaimed novelist, was an "outside" woman in Faulkner's life. Their affair and friendship is worthy of its own story. Included here are extensive interviews with Williams conducted over several years about her relationship with Faulkner, their correspondence, and discussions of both his work and her own. It includes all of Williams's letters to Faulkner and his letters, either directly reproduced or paraphrased.

"Lurie takes particular interest in the influence of cinema on Faulkner's fiction and 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 August of 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."--BOOK JACKET.