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Unhistoricizing Faulkner: Catherine Gunther Kodat
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Published:July 2010
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Abstract
This chapter examines William Faulkner’s sexualities by addressing the questions queer theory poses for historicism. It first describes some fairly recent developments in queer theory in relation to many of the assumptions governing historicist literary analysis and then looks back to the New Historicism that dominated the academy for the last twenty-five years in the wake of Fredric Jameson’s famous 1981 injunction: always historicize! The chapter argues that Faulkner scholarship, beginning with Eric Sunquist’s Faulkner: The House Divided, eagerly responded to Jameson’s call by reconstructing the social and historical contexts of his fiction. It also examines how sexuality relates to biology and rhetoric in Judith Butler’s theory, to history in Michel Foucault’s work, and to psychoanalysis in Tim Dean’s work. Butler, Foucault, and Dean all reject the idea that sexual identity is ever knowable and argue that the question of sexuality best remains a question. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Faulkner’s short story “The Leg” to consider how one angle on his sexualities can lead to a more “unhistoricist” approach enabling “antihistoricist ways of formulating...historicity.”
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