Faulkner's subject

About this book

Faulkner has, for forty years, been canonized as a master of modern literature. Contemporary critical theory, however, calls into question the very terms of this claim--canon, mastery, literature. Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns seeks to offer a reading of William Faulkner for our time, and does so by rethinking his masterpieces through the lenses of current critical theory. The book attends equally to the power of his work and to the current theoretical issues that would call that power into question. Drawing on poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, ideological, and gender theory, Weinstein examines the harrowing process of "becoming oneself" at the heart of these novels. This self is always male, and it achieves subjective focus only through strategically mystifying or marginalizing women and blacks. The cosmos he called his own--the textual world he produced, of which he would be "sole owner and proprietor"--emerges as a cosmos no one owns, a verbal territory also generated (and biased) by the larger culture's discourses of gender and race. Like subjectivity itself, it is a cosmos no one owns.