ABSTRACT
Creating Yoknapatawpha is a study of the crucial interplay of reading and writing processes involved in constructing the textual environment of William Faulkner’s work, and the nature and significance of the world created by these many forces. Yoknapatawpha County, the author contends, is the product of these mainly mental processes of construction at all levels, and it is in the similar and even analogous situations that exist between readers and writers of and in the fiction that the dynamic of Faulkner’s work is most keenly discovered. The book discusses novels from throughout Faulkner’s career, and uses elements of Bakhtinian and reader-response theory, among others, to explore its subject, eschewing the limited focus both of strictly formal and more content-oriented approaches, and demonstrating the need for readers and writers to work together, whether harmoniously or otherwise. By examining the fictive nature of Yoknapatawpha, and the requirement for everybody to participate fully in its creation, we can establish useful bases for investigations into the ‘real world’ issues with which Faulkner is so concerned.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |9 pages
Introduction
part |30 pages
Faulkner and the Reader
chapter |10 pages
To Look Upon Evil: The Conspiring Reader of Sanctuary
part |42 pages
Writers in Yoknapatawpha
chapter |4 pages
Doing Things Bigger Than He Was: John Sartoris
chapter |18 pages
That Florid, Swaggering Gesture: Thomas Sutpen
chapter |18 pages
Monuments and Footprints: The Mythology of Flem Snopes
part |53 pages
Readers in Yoknapatawpha
chapter |10 pages
Witnesses to the Extinction: Reading the Sartoris Text
chapter |19 pages
Interested Parties and Theorems to Prove: Snopeswatching
part |73 pages
Creating Yoknapatawpha