Pictorialism, Prolixity, and Spatial Form in Faulkner’s Post-Hollywood Racial Imaginary

Abstract

Faulkner's modernism founds its footing with his first great experimental novels and their use of interior monologue to meditate on Southern identity and the region's class ills.Following Sanctuary's 1931 publishing and the first studio contract it prompted, Faulkner's fiction altered, becoming more expansive and encompassing.This paper describes the broadened social and formal "scale" of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels and considers what role his encounter with the film medium played in this development.Faulkner's work had always betrayed his interest in pictorialism. Yet as several examples suggest, this tendency increased and broadened across his later career.This paper uses ideas from image theory such as W.J.T. Mitchell's "metapictures" to suggest a relationship between Faulkner's remunerations in Hollywood and the expanded lexical, syntactic, and formal workings-as well as the broadened historical and racial considerations-in his Post-Hollywood novels