Yoknapatawpha’s Rhyming Events

Abstract: This essay by the creator of the Digital Yoknapatawpha project explores a category of intertextual events that it calls “rhyming” –events that involve different characters, locations and dates in Yoknapatawpha’s larger history but are nonetheless closely linked together by various kinds of echoes. This pattern has two major claims on our attention: for what it reveals about Faulkner’s willingness, or perhaps his need, to keep recreating Yoknapatawpha each time he returned to it as the site of his long struggle to come to terms with the legacy of the Southern past; and for what it implies about the potential limitations of digital humanities projects like Digital Yoknapatawpha .