Clarke, Deborah Harker, Jaime L. Segrest, Mab

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Considering the Unthinkable: The Risks and Rewards of Decanonizing Faulkner / Deborah Clarke, Arizona State UniversityAre we doing Faulkner any favors by canonizing him? To what extent does our belief in his greatness foreclose different ways of reading his work? Do we default to if Faulkner did it, it must be brilliant, giving him the benefit of all doubts? Ill be looking at how our reverence for his work may actually hinder our understanding of it, as well as alienating students and colleagues who dont dare to admit their resistance and doubt. Rather than using Faulkners difficulty as a way to silence critics, lets consider what happens if we admit that it may be a problem. Its time to re-think why Faulkner shouldor shouldntretain his position atop the American literary canon. Popular Faulkner: Pulp Paperbacks, Oprahs Book Club, and the Curse of the Hypercanonical / Jaime Harker, University of MississippiBecause of Faulkners hypercanonical statusthat is, because his writing seems to exemplify the autonomous aesthetic object, placed in opposition to mass culturedecades of brilliant scholarship about Faulkners deep and complicated relationship to popular culture have had little effect on the larger direction of Faulkner studies. Building on David Earles book Re-Covering Modernism, I suggest that Cold War paperbacks created an egalitarian, diverse reading and writing community that Oprahs Book Club continued. I conclude by speculating about how a pulp Faulkner canon might construct a new vocabulary for talking about style that articulates multiple interpretive communities and their contingencies of value (in...

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