Faulkner and Money

The matter of money touches the writer's life at every point:in the need to make ends meet, in daily dealings with agents, editors, and publishers, and in the choice of subject matter and the lineaments of the imagined world.William Faulkner was no exception.The people and communities he wrote about were deeply entangled in personal, local, regional, national, and even global networks of industry, commerce, and finance, as was the author himself, whose economic biography often followed, but occasionally bucked, the tumultuous economic trends of the twentieth century.This collection brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the economic contexts of Faulkner's life and work, to follow the proverbial money toward new insights into the Nobel laureate and new questions about his art.Essays address economies of debt and gift-giving in Intruder in the Dust; the legacies of commodity fetishism in Sanctuary and of twentieth-century capitalism's financial turn in The Town; the pegging of self-esteem to financial acumen in the career of The Sound and the Fury's Jason Compson; the representational challenges posed by poverty and failure in Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend tales; the economics of regional readership and the Depression-era literary market; the aesthetic, monetary, and psychological rewards of writing for Hollywood; and the author's role as benefactor to an aspiring African American college student in the 1950s.The Faulkner we meet in these pages is among modern literature's most incisive and encyclopedic critics of what one contemporary theorist calls the madness of economic reason.

Russian formalism

This chapter examines the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics by the Russian formalists (with case studies focusing on Shklovsky, Petrovsky, Tomashevsky, and Propp). It demonstrates that these Russian ‘neo-Aristotelians’ adopt and adapt their key narratological priorities and principles from the Poetics, especially their theories concerning fabula and syuzhet, the primacy of plot, of form synthesizing raw story content, and the importance of the experience and affect of narrative as it is cognitively processed by an audience. Aristotle’s Poetics is made strange in each new iteration of its reading and reception by the Russian ‘neo-Aristotelians’, with each (r)evolution itself configuring a self-conscious reaction of some kind to a contemporary theorist, no less than to Aristotle himself.

Tagging as Lazy Technique: On the Politics of Art as Work

This article looks at the graffiti practice known as “tagging”—and, more specifically, “scratching” or “scratch tagging”—as a social phenomenon that can aid the thinking through of potential resistance to the hegemony of what is sometimes referred to as entrepreneurial subjectivity. While much interesting work has been produced on more “artistic” forms of graffiti—as have been made famous by stencil artists such as Banksy—there is very little work that looks to read scratch tagging as a form of political artistic practice, albeit one that emerges unconsciously and outside of what is commonly designated as the “art world.” Given that the figure of the contemporary artist is so wedded to the flows of international capital, it is worthwhile considering how the scratch tagger unconsciously engages in what the contemporary theorist Maurizio Lazzarato has referred to as “lazy techniques:” that is, forms of practice that are not circumscribed within the dominant logics of utility and productivity and are, accordingly, potentially resistant to the logics underpinning neoliberal capital.

Dull Tom-Tom’s Absurd Prelude: Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot

This article argues for a new understanding of the poetry that Eliot wrote under the influence of Jules Laforgue. The author qualifies the critical consensus on the play of Laforguian irony by tracing Eliot’s development of a more complex view of the ludic, one that anticipates the contemporary theorist Mihai Spariosu’s description of play as alternately “rational” or “prerational.” This article examines select poems written from 1909 to 1912, culminating with “Portrait of a Lady” (eventually published in 1917), showing how Eliot mimics Laforgue’s rational play, only to qualify it against a nascent conception of its prerational counterpart. The paper elucidates Spariosu’s schema as it argues that Eliot’s recognition and exploitation of rational and prerational play is both a strategy of a specifically “ludic modernism” and also a ground for Eliot’s later poetry.