Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T17:25:18.301Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Looking for a Master Plan

Faulkner, Paredes, and the Colonial and Postcolonial Subject

from Part I - The Texts in the World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Philip M. Weinstein
Affiliation:
Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
Get access

Summary

Much has been written about Faulkner’s attitudes toward class and race and about his representations of these issues as the fundamental structures of his most successful fictions. Myra Jehlen, notably, argues for the determining role of the category of class in novels such as Saitohs, The Unvanquished, and especially The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!. Although she does not ignore the centrality of race, Jehlen claims that the reigning problematic in Faulkner’s account of Southern antebellum history is the internal class conflict between two sectors of white agrarian society - the lordly, cavalier plantation class versus the Jeffersonian, homesteading, working-class peasantry. In a deconstructive analysis of Absalom, Absalom! that raises questions of race and class in a related but divergent register, Richard C. Moreland shows how the various narrative strategies of Faulkner’s novel are intended to avert the recognition of this struggle between classes and to disregard the insistent presence of other narratives that underscore the additional pressures of race and gender in Sutpen’s story.

As a classic instance of this paradigmatic structure of revelation and aversion in Faulkner’s major works, Absalom, Absalom! reflects the ideologies of the historical era in which it was composed, the mid-Depression years of early-twentieth-century America. These ideologies underlie Faulkner’s connection with the issues of coloniality and postcoloniality that began to appear in much American, Latin American, and European literature of the immediate pre-World War II years.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×