Faulkner's representation of the process of literary travel emphasizes its division into microlocales rather than its intrusion into. Petersburg, and between my parents' homestead and the pole there is little in the way of what the rest of the world calls "civilization."
Regionalism in its simplest sense is a fetishization of a locale
Even a basic definition thus raises major and seemingly irreconcilable questions: where are the boundaries of the region. This is still not a static definition of the region, any more than structural linguistics indicates a static definition of the sign.
Regionalism has its roots in post-Enlightenment reconceptions of the location of spiritual forces
More intriguing, however, is Marx's observation of how “the pristine American landscape” is “particularly conducive to the cultivation of the 'moral sense'” (130–31). The rise of the sublime, says William Cronon, allowed for an interpretation of nature in which “the supernatural lay just below the surface,” not a place of “satanic temptation” but a.
Regionalism need not be confined to rural locales
I want to make some of the same argument regarding the need for a regionalist style in general. While it is essential for the indigenous people to envision the continued self-sustenance and survival of the region, the visitor is more concerned.
Regionalism is opposed neither to nationalism nor to globalism
I am thinking particularly of Jennifer Rae Greeson's "The Figure of the South and the Nationalizing Imperatives of Early United States Literature" (1999) and Leigh Anne Duck's The Nation's Region (2006).40 Of the two, Greeson's article is more overtly historicist. in its claims, seeks to trace the formation of the U.S. While other critics have praised the way in which regionalism appears to preserve cultural diversities within the broader framework of the ideologically united. 40 In fairness to some of the critics I have cited in this section, I should note that Greeson and Ladd's ideas are becoming more commonplace in academic discourse.
41 Dainotto's interest is also in how "regional fiction" came to represent "various parts of the consolidating nation" (4). This is an almost paradoxical view of the nation/region divide in that it suggests that the region defines the nation by not being of the nation. Given the idea of reciprocal national distinction that I have already mentioned, in which the nation is partly defined by what it is not, we are left with a model of the relationship between the nation and its regions that looks suspiciously like the relationship between one nation and others.
But it will not be enough, as Duck argues, to simply make the nation consistent with the region or the processes of nation-building with the rise of the region. At the beginning of this chapter, I already talked about the intersection of regionalism and globalization.
Originatory Transformation
The end result of the progressively microcosmic visions of literary regionalism is not a tiny region, but an indivisible, individualized perception of the region. What is most interesting about Roma's cases is the fact that not all methods are used. Kreyling explained the concept of the great figure to some extent in relation to Faulkner in Inventing Southern Literature.
Little enough needs to be said about the general prominence of Faulkner in Southern literature. In A Southern Renascence, Howard Odum Davidson's inquiry about Faulkner's Mississippian genesis as "a kind of specific corollary" to the imbalance between the South's production of "great literature" and its situation in the "bottom quartiles" of the country 's "general socio-economic culture" reconsidered. ” (84-85). However, Odum's argument amounts to little more than a disapproving renovation of the Southern landscape, the "horrors" of its "quicksands", the looming "cedar and log houses".
Louis Rubin states in the introduction to the original edition his belief that it "provides the first reasonably complete treatment of the literature of the modern South," and in . Romine concludes, somewhat unsatisfactorily, that "it is certainly too early to tell" but also hints that "reports of the South's demise have been greatly exaggerated" (40).
Epistemological Transformation
See George Handley's "Poetics of the Environment in The Bounty" by Derek Walcott in Callaloo 28:1 (Winter 2005), p. triumph” (419). Perhaps Wolter's "misinterpretation" stems from a long critical fatigue of the connections between Faulkner's writing and that of the Vanderbilt agrarians; even in 1987, Cleanth Brooks called the connection between Faulkner and agrarians' "passionate devotion to the land" a "fairly obvious generalization" (Prejudices, Prejudices, Enduring Beliefs 11).
Nicolaisen concludes that in Faulkner's work "the roots that connect one to one's native land are never idolized in the same way as they are, for example, in many German novels of the 1920s and 1930s", but "the roots " is the same in both cases. (97-98). What Nicolaisen suggests is not essentially an ideological congruence between Faulkner's novels and the novels of certain German nationalists, but rather a repetition of the same elements in these different writings. Although Warren wants to preserve "the author's attempt to define his appropriate relationship to a particular place".
Although comparisons of Faulkner's novels and some of those of the Soviet Union may help,. 15 Translation dates taken from Faulkner's appendix: International Perspectives (proceedings of the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference 1982), Doreen Fowler and Ann Abadie, eds., 1984, as well as Pia Maseiro's "Comparative Chronological Translation in00utums." publication of the South Atlantic Review.
Chaos, Echoes, Totality
Thus we receive dozens of volumes of criticism on Faulkner's stylistic innovation, dozens more on his concerns with race/class/communism/etc., and some blends of the two. The implication is that Faulkner's regionalism qua regionalism is incompatible with globalization and the ideological plans that accompany it. Glissant, however, in including Faulkner's works in his list of échos-monde, is probably thinking, as in Faulkner, Mississippi, of Absalom, and its replication (echo) of the societies and conflicts of the Caribbean in the South.
As Lawrence Schwartz argues in The Making of Faulkner's Reputation, the author's status as a modernist exemplar is heavily conditioned. Cowley's Portable Faulkner of 1946 could actually be said to represent the divide between regional and modernist reception of Faulkner's work, between echoes and chaos. While Duck's reading of The Portable Faulkner does indeed explain Faulkner's persistent regionalism, while serving Kreyling and Schwartz's account of Cowley's sympathy with his modernist tendencies at the expense of his Southern particularities, he also shares with these readings the notion of regionalism as an obstacle to the author's internationalism.
At first glance, Cowley's collection of Faulkner's writing states that the writing constitutes "a work of imagination that has not been compared to in our time" and calls the author "an epic. The generality of the region "South", a point of a compass or the legend on a map, gives way to a "depth" that feeds Faulkner's imagination.
Regional Schizophrenia: The Nobel Prize Speech and A Fable
What seems like an innocent and ironic moment in Faulkner's public life is in fact a telling incident of the author's late self-fashioning and self-citation. This interpretation seems to be supported both by Faulkner's repetition of the language of the Nobel Prize speech in his UNESCO speech and in the text of A Fable (1954). In the end, my argument is less about the particularity of Faulkner's unique position in the eyes of literary critics than it is about the process of interpretation itself, especially comparative interpretation.
What Melas sees as a definitive rewriting of the polyreferential character of Omeros, however, certain other critics on Walcott's part have called a certain falsity. Other parts of The Bounty reinforce the concept of the island as a normative subtext for the poet's wanderings. And yet, almost in the same breath with which Walcott emphasizes the normative, constant concept of the region, he recognizes that the region is to some extent inadequate.
It may be possible to argue something similar with regard to Walcott. Michael Dash does, between “the first moment of modernity in the Caribbean” and “the much more important second moment of a Caribbean appropriation of the modern” (15).
Performance and Personae
Ironically, the most effective way for Walcott to speak with the voice of the region was to move away from it. 14 Regarding the last point, Breslin writes: «The newborn Adam from the Caribbean comes in the burial clothes of the past. In Walcott's later writings, the wounded prodigal takes precedence over Crusoe; Breslin finds in Philoctetes Walcott's recognition of.
In the same essay, Walcott calls his use of Crusoe "varied, contradictory, and as variable as the Old Man of the Sea" (Hamner 35). This debauchery, the "frequent exile" of the beginning of the poem, creates a form of anxiety. There is a sense of climax, of conclusion, in the reviews that the deep and multifaceted angst of The Prodigal perhaps does not support.
It is, in short, a rejection of metapersona's methodology of stylistic unification of different regions. Literary criticism has hardly turned a blind eye to these salient archipelagic connections in the South and the Caribbean.
Interhistory and Displacement
Rather, it is the character of Sutpen's slaves, who are considered by the residents of Jefferson to be more brutal and animalistic than any of the more "domesticated". 41 Hosam Aboul-Ela, among others, strongly insists on the centrality of this section of the novel to the story at large, noting that the "branches" of the Haiti series "influence developments throughout the novel", and that the passage therefore plays a "seed role". Matthews, "Recalling the West Indies: From Yoknapatawpha to Haiti and Back," which finds in certain biographical details as well as stylistic tactics a keen awareness of the Haitian situation on Faulkner's part.
Yet it may be more productive to consider the Haitian section of the novel in light of what its explanation, or rather its lack of explanation, can tell us about how postplantation history manifests itself between the South and the Caribbean. It may be most productive to revisit the relevant sections of the text in this light. The setting for the Haitian segment is Quentin's grandfather's recollection of a story told to him by Sutpen during a hunt for Sutpen's escaped architect, who proves remarkably adept at evading both the couple, their dogs, and the wild slaves: "'He went to the West Indies .
This methodology stands in stark contrast to that of feral, even Caribbean-raised, slaves who operate on pure instinct, suggesting that there is more to the region than meets the eye. The details given by Sutpen are therefore insufficient for the role of the Haitian work in the novel as a whole; General Compson's constant complaints that Sutpen is not telling the whole story is a hint of this lack.
