Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns

by Philip M. Weinstein

Faulkner's Subject offers 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, 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 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"--merges as a cosmos no one owns, a verbal territory also generated (and biased) by the larger culture's discourses of gender and race. Like personal identity itself, it is a cosmos no one owns.

204 pages, Hardcover

First published May 29, 1992