Faulkner’s Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns
Read an excerpt below:
Abiding commitment to a writer may continue indefinitely, yet styles of interpretation change—sometimes dramatically—over time. This book proposes a reading of Faulkner marked by both of these truths. The texts I examine have been received as canonical masterpieces for some forty years now, and I (a participant in that assessment) have long seen in Faulkner a master of modern fiction. But current ideas about what it means to write and to read have transformed this notion of mastery and have led many of us to reconceive our sense of the subject-in-culture, of culture-in-the-subject. The cosmos Faulkner proudly called his own now appears (inasmuch as it is constituted in writing) a cosmos no one can own, an achievement to the hilt enabled by discursive practices not amenable to private ownership.
This book and others by Philip Weinstein are available for purchase on Amazon.
Editorial Reviews
"...splendid in the range of questions it raises and the number of illuminating readings it offers....Faulkner's Subject is a work of considerable scholarship....[Weinstein's] study will be indispensable for further ideological analyses."
John N. Duvall, Mississippi Quarterly
"Weinstein's readings of all four novels are sensitive, subtle, and at times even impassioned."
Susan V. Donaldson, Journal of American History
"Philip Weinstein has written a brilliant, candid, timely book, not just about Faulkner as a writer but also about Faulkner as a changing institution of reading and teaching."
Richard C. Moreland, Modern Fiction Stories
