Detecting the south in fiction, film & television

Abstract

Watson’s treatment of Faulkner’s work does not ultimately ‘make it new’, as the dust cover hopefully suggests, it nonetheless provides a useful and engaging reminder of that corpus’s capaciousness and capacity to support diverse, even contradictory, readings. Moreover, although Watson does not make this point explicitly, it is also nonetheless evident from these readings that Faulkner’s multi-generational, multi-volume Yoknapatawpha saga – with its central preoccupation with the processing of inheritance and change – provides an exceptionally fertile ground for exploring, rethinking, and complicating modernity’s discourses, and for viewing, through that kaleidoscopic textual lens, the many and revolving faces that modernism might take.