Faulkner's Pylon

What is paradoxical about the historical experience of modernism is that it designates very precisely that period in which Nature—or the in- or anti-human-is everywhere in the process of being displaced or destroyed, expunged, eliminated, by the achievements of human praxis and human production. The great modernist literature—from Baudelaire and Flaubert to Ulysses and beyond-is a city literature: its object is therefore the anti-natural, the humanised, par excellence, a landscape which is everywhere the result of human labour, in which everything-including the formerly natural, grass, trees, our own bodies-is finally produced by human beings. This is then the historical paradox with which the experience of contingency confronts us (along with its ideologies—existentialism and nihilism—and its aesthetics—modernism): how can the city be meaningless? How can human production be felt to be absurd or contingent, when in another sense one would think it was only human labour which created genuine meaning in the first place

Absurdism · Aesthetics · Art · Contingency · Epistemology · Excellence · Existentialism · Ideology · Linguistics · Literature · Meaning (existential · Modernism (music · Natural (archaeology · Object (grammar · Political science · Praxis · Reproduction · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · History · Law · Philosophy · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation

• The Burden of Southern History

  C Vann Woodward•The Burden of Southern History•1913

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• Faulkner in the University

  James Meriwether, James B Meriwether et al.•American Literature•1960

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• Faulkner's Introduction to The Sound and the Fury

  Philip Cohen, Doreen Fowler•American Literature•1990

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• Selected Letters of William Faulkner

  Hyatt H Waggoner, Joseph Blotner•American Literature•1977

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• Seeing and Being

  John Michael, Carolyn Porter•Modern Language Notes•1982

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