Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County: Geographical Fact into Fiction

1977 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles S. Aiken
Keyword(s):  
Yoknapatawpha County

The Fable of the Writer in Southern Fiction

Prospects ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 249-266
Author(s):  
Lewis P. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Deep South ◽  
The South ◽  
Southern Fiction ◽  
Yoknapatawpha County ◽  
The One

No scene in Faulkner is more compelling than the one that transpires on a “long still hot weary dead September afternoon” in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, toward the end of the first decade of this century. Quentin Compson sits with Miss Rosa Coldfield in a “dim airless room” still called “the office because her father called it that,” and listens to Miss Rosa tell her version of the story of the “demon” Sutpen and his plantation, Sutpen's Hundred. As she talks “in that grim haggard amazed voice”—“vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand”—the 22-year-old Mississippi youth discovers he is hearing not Miss Rosa but the voices of “two separate Quentins.” One voice is that of the “Quentin preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous baffled ghosts.” The other voice is that of the Quentin “who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as she [Miss Rosa] was.” The two Quentins talk “to one another in the long silence of notpeople, in notlanguage: It seems that this demon—his name was Sutpen—(Colonel Sutpen)—Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation”.

Terrorizing Whiteness in Yoknapatawpha County

2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-42
Author(s):  
Sharon Desmond Paradiso
Keyword(s):  
Yoknapatawpha County

From Yoknapatawpha County to St. Raphael Parish: Faulknerian Influence on the Works of Ernest J. Gaines

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wharton Lowe ◽  
Jay Watson
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Yoknapatawpha County ◽  
The Impact

This essay examines affinities between Faulkner and one of the South’s most important contemporary authors, Ernest J. Gaines. It begins by noting the powerful geographical and intertextual imagination at work in the two writers: each created a bounded fictional domain that served as the principal setting for numerous works (Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and Gaines’s Louisiana parish of St. Raphael), each used recurring characters across multiple fictions and each writer’s assembled books speak in a kind of dialogue with each other that integrates and amplifies the impact of the overall body of work. By his own admission, Gaines learned much from Faulkner, but just as important are the things to avoid that he found in Faulkner. Where Faulkner too often portrays African Americans in narrow terms of victimization or sheer endurance, Gaines went beyond those limitations to present black figures who achieve a full human standing acknowledged by the larger community.

Faulkner's Geography and Topography

PMLA ◽  
1962 ◽  
Vol 77 (5) ◽  
pp. 652-659 ◽  
Author(s):  
Calvin S. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Good Deal ◽  
Yoknapatawpha County

In most criticism of Faulkner it has been taken for granted that his Yoknapatawpha County is really Lafayette (accented on fay) County, Mississippi, and that his Jefferson, the county seat, is really Oxford. Little evidence on the matter has been given beyond a few very general resemblances, and little has been demanded. Recently, however, the assumption has been questioned, with a considerable marshaling of arguments and statistics. It seems proper, therefore, to go into the question in some detail, particularly since a good deal of the evidence is already beyond the reach of the literary researcher and much of the rest will probably disappear within the next few years. Local changes have already been sufficient to lead to some literary misinterpretations.

“Liable to be anything”: The Creation of Joe Christmas in Faulkner's Light in August

2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
OWEN ROBINSON
Keyword(s):  
Cumulative Effect ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Light In August ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
Theoretical Mass ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Yoknapatawpha County

Joe Christmas, the central figure of William Faulkner's Light in August (1932), is in many ways the archetypal character of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, largely because his engagement with so many regional and theoretical archetypes undermines the authority of any one of them while displaying dramatically their cumulative effect as a multiform, created life. Such is the complexity of his presence and role in Light in August and Yoknapatawpha, that he suggests himself strongly as a means of considering the personal manifestations of the county's sprawling network of readings and writings as a theoretical mass. Indeed, for one of the most apparent characters in Faulkner's work, in terms of the strength of his actions and their results, he is phenomenally hard to pin down; this, indeed, is at the root of many of his problems and the problems of those who try to define him. To an extreme extent, Christmas forces us to see creative activity on every level of the fictive process: Faulkner and his reader, Joe himself and the numerous interpreters he has in the novel, and, crucially, in the encounters and tensions between them. As such, he is a pertinent means of comprehending the analogous nature of the writing and reading to be found within Yoknapatawpha with that of the series of novels in which the county is sited. In attempting to understand Joe Christmas, therefore, we must abandon any hope of discovering any singular or defining answers, and engage with him on the dialogic terms he demands.

Slavery, Modernity, and the Turn towards Death in the Black Atlantic World of Yoknapatawpha County

2019 ◽  
pp. 208-286
Author(s):  
Jay Watson
Keyword(s):  
Race Relations ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Fear Of Death ◽  
Just World ◽  
Black Intellectual ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Atlantic Slavery ◽  
Yoknapatawpha County ◽  
Paul Gilroy ◽  
Struggle For Recognition

As Faulkner wrote his way into the crisis of Mississippi race relations across the 1930s and 1940s, he turned with increasing frequency to the subject of slavery and the figures of black slaves. In these figures he progressively recognized what Paul Gilroy identifies as a counter-Hegelian modernity that rewrites Hegel’s master–slave dialectic along new lines. Where for Hegel the struggle for recognition between lord and bondsman was predicated on the latter’s inevitable submission to the former, Faulkner’s fictions of slavery come more nearly to evoke a black intellectual legacy in which the dialectic pivots not on the slave’s fear of death but on what Gilroy calls the turn towards death. Here death functions not as an index of despair, surrender, or flight, but as a powerful ontological resource, a revolutionary negation of Atlantic slavery whose eschatological implications point to the possibility of a freer and more just world elsewhere.

“The Narrators”

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Luis Borges
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Air Force ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Light In August ◽  
As I Lay Dying ◽  
Sound And The Fury ◽  
Yoknapatawpha County ◽  
Royal Canadian Air Force

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.

Interrogation, Torture, and Confession in William Faulkner’s Light in August

2017 ◽  
pp. 108-121
Author(s):  
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
Light In August ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
National Debate ◽  
Racialized Violence ◽  
Yoknapatawpha County ◽  
Jim Crow South

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.

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