Sweating on the Small Stuff: The Materiality of Form in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

Abstract

The essay explores the materialist capacities of the first person pronoun in William Faulkner's 1930 novel As I Lay Dying. Through linked close readings, the essay builds a case for the pronoun as a socially mediated response to the alienations attendent upon emergent capitalism in the US South; and it draws out unmade links between labour (as a magnitude of value and aesthetic measure) and the commodity form in its social - and increasingly international - contexts. Drawing out new links between American and French modernisms, the essay sheds new light on the relation between intellectual and manual labour in the context of a modernising South.