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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.
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.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Modernism and the Absent Event of Romance
1. A Folklore of Speed
2. Affect and Spatial Dynamics in Flags in the Dust and The Sound
and the Fury
3. Currents of Consciousness; or, my mother is a graphophone
4. The Negative Plate, or Absalom, Absalom! and the camera's voice
Julian Murphet is the Director of the Centre for Modernism Studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of four books, most recently Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde (CUP 2009).
"From our leading theorist of multimedia modernism, by previous
title and by any other name, and under the command again of
Murphet's dialectical zest as well as virtuoso prose, this book is
a gripping revisionary look at Faulkner's means for deflecting his
inveterate gothic melodrama with such technomodernist evocations as
those associated with the culture industry, from radio and
phonography to photoessayism and film, all as a sheltering
interface for the
novelist's romance atavism. Marxist literary history, formalist
narratology, and nuanced genre theory converge on these issues in a
monumentally incisive demonstration-and a thrilling critical
narrative
all its own." -- Garrett Stewart, author of Transmedium:
Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art
"Faulkner's Media Romance is an extraordinary book. With
breathtaking originality, Julian Murphet transforms our
conceptualizations of Faulkner's motivating thematic concerns,
anxieties about genre, and stylistic ambitions. He reimagines the
terms of Faulkner's confrontation with modernity and modernism by
locating Faulkner's writing within its modern media environment.
This book brilliantly demonstrates how Faulkner's engagement with
the new forms of
mechanical (and later electric) reproduction of voice and visual
field constituted both a massive claim on Faulkner's project as a
writer, by posing a threat to the very status and purpose of
literature, but
also provided an unlooked for opportunity to crack open the social
mentalities and generic traditions that constrained him. This is
criticism of superior intelligence, and its enormous richness will
occupy Faulkner scholarship and modernist studies for a good
while." -- John T. Matthews, Boston University
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