Faulkner

Abstract

After a relatively down year of William Faulkner scholarship last year, 2017 sees several books and an impressive array of articles. The foremost topic of discussion is media studies, with a particular emphasis on film and screenwriting. Writing about media, especially screenplays, requires new hermeneutical approaches, which in turn serve to bring less-discussed Faulkner works into new light, including the hybrid, screenplay-influenced Requiem for a Nun and the novel later adapted to film, The Reivers. The exploration of media is also part of a larger effort in many of the publications this year to examine the details of Faulkner’s production of texts, literally the venues in which he published, the audiences he targeted, and other workaday aspects of his career, all of which mark a departure from the long-standing tradition of viewing Faulkner as simply a writer of genius largely apart from the realities of a writing career. In such work may be discerned also a growing interest in the role of nonhuman animals and things in Faulkner’s career and within the fictional and poetic worlds he created. Also noteworthy is a selection of essays that consider theorists less often applied to Faulkner, such as René Girard, Ronald David Laing, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.