research topics

Research Ideas:

These are suggestions as you think about your research paper in this course. It's not a restrictive menu, but more of a set of ingredients or recipes that you can borrow wholesale or use as a basis for your own improvisation:

  1. Oprah Winfrey and Faulkner: see the special issue of Mississippi Quarterly on Oprah’s Book Club and its promotion of Faulkner’s works.
  2. Faulkner and periodicals:
    1. “Signet pulps”: linking of Faulkner with “low” literary forms via Sanctuary and Wild Palms and Pylon.
    2. The Unvanquished and/or _Go Down, Moses _as a window into Faulkner’s work for “big magazines,” looking perhaps at recent work like Harris’s book on modernism and “big magazines” or Hutner’s work on middlebrow fiction.
  3. Faulkner in Latin America (see Paul Fess’s work)
  4. Faulkner’s reception: in France (esp. Sartre), in Latin America, in Mississippi, in Japan. Glissant, Fuentes, Sartre, Marquez, Borges (Jay Parini quotes from many reviews of WF by Borges)
  5. Faulkner and Hollywood.
  6. Faulkner and Civil Rights
  7. Faulkner and Southern history (see Williamson and Gorra)
  8. Native American presence in Faulkner
  9. Faulkner’s midwives: Malcolm Cowley, Phil Stone, etc. See Cowley’s long essay on WF in SATURDAY REVIEW in 1930s
  10. Faulkner and beginnings of American modernism: see Hugh Kenner's essay from the 1970s.
  11. Faulkner and periodicals: SatEvePost, DOUBLE DEALER, etc.
  12. Ecocritical Faulkner: especially work on AILD/TSAF and Great Flood of 1927
  13. Review-essay of one of the Yoknapatawpha conference volumes.
  14. Faulkner and the Nobel prize. Might look at Jim English's work on literary prizes and the politics of prestige.
  15. Queer Faulkner (the annual Faulkner conference in Oxford, MS is on this theme this summer!)
  16. Faulkner and plantation tradition: how Faulkner revises and draws from 19thC popular depictions of plantation life by such authors as Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page.
  17. Faulkner, New Orleans, and the DOUBLE DEALER: the urban sketch tradition and its relation to his later impressionism.
  18. Faulkner and noir: SANCTUARY, THE BIG SLEEP, etc.
  19. Reception of a novel: of TSAF, for example, or of SANCTUARY.
  20. Maurice Coindreu’s translations of WF into French in 1930s: Sartre, Malreaux, de Beauvoir, Camus are fans.
  21. SANCTUARY and publication history: use reviews or covers or editions to speak to the position of WF between “high” and “pulp” and “middlebrow” positions. Modern Library edition is especially interesting in 1931.
  22. New Critics’ embrace of Faulkner in the 40s and 50s: especially Warren and Brooks. Look at their publications and especially textbooks in light of the GI Bill’s expansion of the academy.
  23. Adaptations: flipside of Faulkner’s writing for Hollywood, also see ballet of AILD and/or the Elevator Repair Service company’s adaptation of TSAF, this year’s BRIC performance of AILD.
  24. Faulkner’s bookshelf: basis of his fiction in other reading.
  25. Changes in GDM or U from magazine pieces to novel: riff on markets and on formal/ideological constraints of periodical publication. Components of novel as “stories about niggers,” says WF to Haas (SL 124).
  26. Big change in GDM is the construction of blacks with a “capacity for memory” and thus as possessed of a fuller subjectivity (160).
  27. Anecdote of INTRUDER as Hollywood story, premiere at Oxford, and Faulkner’s refusal to invite the Puerto Rican star (Lucas’s role) Juano Hernandez to the cast party at Rowan Oak. More ironic repetition (167).
  28. Figure of writing within Faulkner’s works, especially the role of women (Johanna Burden in LIA, Granny in U) and African Americans (Christmas in LIA, Ringo in U). Might focus instead on the notorious ledger from GDM.
  29. Faulkner and money:
    1. Godden’s reading of AA as one of the most searching representations of the economics of slavery.
    2. Tracing the various economic “games” in GDM, especially via Davis’s book.
    3. Looking at “unevenness” of modernization via TSAF and Jason’s obsession with Wall St., for example.
    4. Credit and the South: Faulkner’s distinctive way of thinking about economics might be bound to the South as a credit-starved colony of sorts in the aftermath of the Civil War.
  30. Faulkner and Haiti (or other areas in the Caribbean): using Richard Godden’s work as a springboard, or the article we’re reading by Matthews, explore how Faulkner represents the South as part of a broader Caribbean or South Atlantic landscape. You might also look at other representations of the region to provide a comparative perspective. My colleague Jeremy Glick has written a widely acclaimed book on the afterlife of the Haitian Revolution that might be a useful jumping-off point.
  31. Again, thinking of Godden’s argument, you might write about Faulkner’s representation of labor, and in particular labor as embedded in the slave system, in AA.
  32. Faulkner and animals: Hasratian’s article on LIA is a good jumping-off point to think about the boundaries between bodies and minds, appetites and thoughts, nature and culture. Besides LIA, AILD might be relevant, as well as Go Down, Moses, or just the hunting stories therein, like “The Bear” and “The Old People.”
  33. AA! and the "poetics of historiography": for the theoretically minded, might read Faulkner's novel as an experiment in the limits of the "historical novel" or of how we think about and narrate the past more broadly. Could read Benjamin's Theses on History alongside the novel, or the historiographic theory of Hayden White (see Metahistory), or other examples of imaginative work that push the envelope (e.g., Du Bois's Black Reconstruction or DocPo projects like Simon Ortiz's From Sand Creek).