Faulkner's Cartographies of Consciousness

This book provides a new interdisciplinary interpretation of William Faulkner that combines literary critique with network and complexity science.

John Michael Corrigan (Author)

9781009377850, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 November 2023

246 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.52 kg

William Faulkner continues to be an author who is widely read, studied, and admired. This book provides a new and interdisciplinary account of Faulkner's legacy, arguing that his fiction is just as relevant today as it was during his own time. Indeed, Faulkner's far-reaching critique of his Southern heritage speaks directly to the anti-racism discourse of our own time and engages the dire threat to subjecthood in a technologically saturated civilization. Combining literary critique with network and complexity science, this study offers a new reading of William Faulkner as a novelist for the information age. Over the course of his career, we find an artist struggling to articulate the threat to human wellbeing in rapidly scaling social systems and gradually developing a hard-won humanism that affirms the individual and interpersonal life as a source of novelty and social change.

Introduction: Faulkner in the Information Age
1. Murder in the house of memory
2. A clock in place of the Sun
3. Invasions of interiority
4. When ideology wavers
5. Beyond the tyranny of textual space
6. Architecture of interiority
Conclusion: between image and ideology.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]